


A Machine for Prayer

by dieuclaw



Series: A Machine for Prayer [1]
Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: (the horror is existence), Biological Warfare, Body Horror, Explicit Sexual Content, Human!Q, M/M, Mirror Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:07:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27768778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dieuclaw/pseuds/dieuclaw
Summary: 2368. In the wake of the Revolution the remnants of the Empire are divided, the Continuum is collapsing, and Q is stranded on the ISSEnterprise.Why did you wish me milder? Would you have meFalse to my nature? Rather say I playThe man I am.
Relationships: Jean-Luc Picard/Q, Locutus of Borg/Q
Series: A Machine for Prayer [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2178324
Comments: 22
Kudos: 42





	1. Farewell Spit

**Author's Note:**

> This _is_ the Mirror Universe, so certain names and assignments have been changed accordingly. Q is still Q.
> 
> Idk anything about beta canon and I haven’t seen disco or read any of the novels. That said, I’ve taken events from a handful of episodes and shamelessly recontexualized them for my own purposes:
> 
> ENCOUNTER AT FARPOINT  
> DÉJÀ Q  
> THE OFFSPRING  
> THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
> 
> The title is lifted from the _Houseki no Kuni_ chapter of the same name.

_“How like a God!” You said that to me, once, talking about yourself. I said, “Surely, you don’t see humanity like that, do you?” And you said, “Yes.”_

_Oh, I laughed for centuries, far away where you couldn’t see. You were right, of course, although it’s not quite as romantic as you may expect._

_I can’t explain it in a way you’ll understand--believe me, I’ve tried. There is no beginning or end of the universe, it is a series of concentric intersecting circles, an ouroboros of idiocy, sound and fury. And in every eventuality, every instance, every atom where we exist, I **** you._

_What? It’s a four-letter word. We’re not supposed to say those, you always tell me. Now you’re going to start complaining, like, “Q, you’re not making any sense.” Well, I told you so. Just sit still, and listen._

_Why don’t I show you what God is?_

#

236?, Stardate Unknown

Imperial Nexus Planet “Earth”

Cape Farewell, Zealandia 

“We can’t stay,” Q says, turning back to face him.

The sky is perfect blue. Picard walks without thinking: he’s been this way before, but the last thing he remembers is red tiger’s-eye light, an endless velvet: like looking at the inside of your eyelids. The trans-ambient catalytic modulator has been on the blink for a solar year and subject to maintenance, with mixed results.

(Two years ago, an away team got beamed together into an amalgam that lived miraculously for thirty-eight hours, and in 2359 Commander Riker and CMO Howard switched bodies. Remember: it can always be worse.)

A bead of sweat runs down Q’s temple. The entity is dressed in riding pants and an open, breezy tunic, appropriate for the weather. He’s got burrs on his sleeves and a smudge of dirt on his nose. The illusion is _so_ close, almost there–-it’s only that something’s off, about the way light hits him. If you look from the corner of your eye, he is seethrough, refracting an inestimable brilliance.  A thousand tiny rainbows arc around and through everything. 

“I hope not,” Picard replies acridly. “Where is this, Q, the past? Future? Tau Quadrant?” Transporter malfunction? Again, maybe not.

“Distance and time are two axes that measure the same thing,” Q agrees. He falls in step beside Picard easily. The shore is uneven and treacherous under their boots, stones made round with time, but Q is as surefooted as a mountain goat, and as belligerent. Even the way he walks is annoying. His movements are so fluid, loping, he’s so tall. There’s an easy elegance to him. “You know what I mean.”

There’s a coiling, angry red mark on his skin, like a tattoo or port-wine stain, that wraps around his neck and disappears under his tunic. Picard knows the shape of it, the path it takes, although he can’t recall seeing Q disrobed ever in his life.

_“Someone did this to you.”_

_“Yes–-we call ourselves the Q._ _Or you can call me that, if you want. It’s the same thing._ _”_

_“You don’t strike me as a masochist.”_

Picard is staring again.

It’s hopeless. “Be that as it may, I can’t imagine this has anything to do with what’s happening at Farpoint. I need to get back to the _Enterprise_.”

“Do you?” Q feigns a small shock. “You brought us here, Captain. You’re free to go as you please.”

Picard keeps walking towards the lighthouse. It’s difficult to take stock of the situation when it feels so ordinary, although lighthouses like this are next to obsolete on Earth in the 24 th century. This one is freshly whitewashed and he can see the lens glinting in the sun. It must be Q extrapolating from his memory, from a holofilm he’d seen once, a novel or a lucid dream. Q’s probably reading his mind right now.

“I’ve never read your mind, Jean-Luc.” Picard glares at him and Q just holds up his hands, caught. “This is all you. I’m surprised we’re not picking grapes.”

“Excuse me?”

“In fact, I should thank you for bypassing such a sordid cliché.”

“You can thank me by putting a stop to this! Whatever point you’re trying to make, Q, it isn’t working.”

“Obviously not. But it’s a beautiful day. Why not enjoy it?”

It really is. It’s intoxicating. The smell of salt, and the horizon over a mirror sea. The lighthouse, far away on a spit of sand. Not much of a beach otherwise, just the rocks, and the shells of dead animals, delicate little bones. Picard’s carrying his Armada-issue jacket over his arm.

A horizon line is rare in space, where all courses are three or four or fifth-dimensional. He’s so focused on the sea that he stumbles, and Q catches his arm, spins him close.

“Is it possible?” Picard wonders, out loud.

Q knows, of course, what he’s asking. “The Q are omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, more or less… not always right.” At this distance, his pupils aren’t black–-they shift color, constantly, glittering with a full spectrum of invisible light. “Where are we going?”

“To the lighthouse,” Picard snaps. They’re walking again, the back of his uniform is damp with sweat.

“See what I mean?!”

“I can’t, Q!”

“And you’re giving up _so_ quickly. I’m disappointed.”

“I can only do what I can. What you’re saying is impossible.”

“Not impossible. Just a little shift in _your_ perception of _your_ universe.” Q grins, _I-told-you-so_ , eyes burning like the first-class Fresnel lens in the distance, diamond-colored and clearer than the sky. Three points of light, all fixed on him. Or was it four? “We are exactly where you want to be.”

Picard inhales gingerly through his nose. He doesn’t blink. He’s losing his balance again, he’ll have to shift his weight in a moment to steady himself. “You were right,” Picard says, slowly. No sudden moves. Q is so close, he can feel the heat rolling off him like a warp core. 

“Of course I was.”

“You _are_ dangerous.” There is a growing brightness in him, too, now, something he can’t name in the pit of his stomach. It’s another beacon. The fourth light? He refuses to ask, _What have you done to me?_

“You’re the one with a Destroyer-Class starship,”  Q laughs. “And I’m not controlling you, _mon capitaine_. Don’t look at me like that. I would never, truly, I promise.”

“What do you want, Q?”

“That’s quite a profound question. I’m sure I don’t know, and I know everything about everything. _You_ know,” Q looks skyward, as if someone will corroborate what he’s saying, “Usually, there’s a trial, lots of pomp and circumstance, but this time it’s going to be the other way around.”

“Q–-“

“Don’t worry. I’ll make it good for you.”

Q snaps his fingers.  There’s a shift in something, imperceptibly. 

The universe ends.


	2. In Sickness, Unto Death

2368, Stardate 45539.1

The Sigma Quadrant

It’s not as if the ISS _Enterprise_ -6 was on the wrong side of the revolution, or even as if there had been definite sides, but when everything went hypernova Captain Jean-Luc Picard took the Armada’s flagship out to open space and now she wasn’t welcome home.

On bad days, the _Enterprise_ traded the Alliance for transporter parts and bounty-hunting contracts. On good days the crew were amateur cartographers, explorers, shadow-conquerors on the edge of Forever. Never leave a trace, _try_ not to kill, but flag a backwater barely-civilized planet on a map and call it yours–-it was like that.

 _Four years_ of that, and then one summer’s day: Q, on the bridge. We’ll start there.

It was Gamma shift. Q was naked and had just become reacquainted with gravity, linear time, and his right anterior cruciate ligament, in that order. The Orion ensign at the helm shrieked as if he were a lesser Ceti eel and pulled her stun knife on him.

He couldn’t have moved, even if he wanted to. He was still recovering from the shock, the indignity of this, and the weight of water. Every last one of his thirty-eight trillion cells hated itself. His best effort at self-defense was to lie there on the _Enterprise_ ’s shitty carpet and focus on his breathing.

The Orion, correctly surmising he was not in any way a threat, kicked him in the ribs. “Are you fucking serious right now?”

Q coughed. Why does the human trachea cross the gullet the way it does? Setting that aside, she was obviously remembering the thing with the Borg, so he was going to have to think of something to say, and fast, or he’d be out of the airlock faster than he’d arrived.

“You total fucking slag. You dick. You’re from Engineering, aren’t you? You tell Lana I’ve had enough of her bullshit insane mindgames, just because I’m hypersexual _does not mean I cheated on her—!_ ”

Or maybe she hadn’t been around for the Borg.

 _“_ What’s going on, Ensign?”

The rest of the skeleton crew had wandered over to rubberneck: a furry, fleabitten systems engineer on his second cup of coffee and one of the Soong androids.

“Waste of air, sir.” The Orion kicked him again, to make her point. “From Engineering.”

“No, he’s not a member of this crew, Ensign. Don’t worry about it.” The android dropped to his haunches and knotted his gloved fingers in Q’s hair. A few strands popped out at the root. “I’ll deal with this.”

“Lore,” Q grinned. The Soongs weren’t hard to tell apart once you knew them. “How wonderful, to see a familiar face. I _must_ speak to Je– to Captain Picard.”

Lore’s gold eyes flicked as he registered this information and the various possible implications of Q’s arrival branched out across his neural net. He recognized Q, that was certain. Q, but with mild tachycardia, all functions otherwise nominal and very much human.

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here, Q, before you waste the Captain’s time with your lying dogshit motormouth?” Lore had a bizarre Mona Lisa smile that never matched his inflection. He pulled Q up to standing and he, Q, winced, trying to keep his weight off his injured knee, and grasped at Lore’s arm for balance only to collapse. Lore stepped back and Q fell at his feet. 

“I didn’t know you were programmed to use expletives,” Q said. Never let them see you sweat, right? “You really _are_ fully f–“

Lore Soong hit him so hard his ears rang.

“Ensign, get this naked ape something to wear.”

#

Lore locked him in the ready-room, jumpsuited up, with his wrists zip-tied together. Stupid, and extraneous. He had no idea what Lore expected he’d get up to, but in any case, Lore did not return. That left Q with plenty of free time to wander around the office, limping, choking on his own saliva, feeling sorry for himself and torturously alone.

The human brain, like the human pharynx, is a perfect example of bad design: it knows itself. If you can imagine it, that is how we–-the Continuum–-know each other. We are all Q. All-knowing, all-seeing, very attractive, and immortal. Everyone’s secrets are a public forum. Personal space is unheard of. We are inextricably linked, stunning silver threads in a tapestry of consciousness.

So, we almost never die. We are also great at compartmentalizing. Our only natural enemy is ourselves, and there are not many of us, unruly and individualistic as we are. It is within our power–-and in our nature–-to affect the perceived universe. Matter, time, space, dark matter. How? Well, when you think, electrical impulses in your brain create a reality. It’s a very physical act. The Q are the same. 

You would recognize some of it, some of the nebulas in your Quadrant, the Galápagos finches, bismuth. None of it means anything, although it has personal significance to us. You do not intend for bugs to live in the bulkhead insulation of your ship, but they do.

It sounds sublime, but the Continuum excommunicated Q. Screw ‘em.

Gamma shift was technically morning, but still early enough to be late last night. It was an epoch before the door finally hissed open. Q was sprawled sideways in Picard’s desk chair, his good leg hooked over the armrest, hands where the Captain could see them. 

“ _Captain_ Jean-Luc Picard,” Q thought to embrace him, and then thought better of it. “It’s wonderful to see you again.” Wonderful, again. Wondrous. Fantastic.

Exile agreed with Picard. He had a healthy glow to him, a wildness Q had only caught glimpses of through mirrors up til now, better posture, and a double-rail phaser on his hip. There were calluses on his fingers from using an honest-to-God ballpoint pen. Gray eyes like a hawk’s, with a beak to match and, yes, bald.

He let the door slide shut behind him.

“Lock. Override authorization Picard Zulu One.”

“ _Nice to see you too, Q,”_ Q suggested, helpfully.

“Q.” The letter really doesn’t mean anything, by the way. We had to pick a symbol on the fly, and liked the look of it. Too bad your species moved away from pictograms and hieroglyphs–-could’ve had something better to call us, but hindsight’s 20/20. Or not.

“Come on, you’re not still mad about–-?”

Picard looked straight through him, out the window. The _Enterprise_ was cruising at Warp 5 or 6. Stars stitched past, frothing river rapids space carrying them to an undiscovered destination. “I should kill you, for what you did to my crew.”

Q would know his voice in a solar storm.

“If you’re referring to the incident with the Borg, it was three years ago!” Q broke the zip tie over his knee for emphasis. It hurt.

“Three years is nothing to you.”

This was in line with typical Picard hysterics. “We’re not talking about me.”

Picard hummed at that, pretending to ignore Q as he put in an order for coffee and a croissant from the replicator. Has anyone mentioned he’s _beyond_ boring? Have they mentioned that Q is transcendent? Of course we are always talking about Q.

“Of course we are. Get up,” he gestured with his pastry. By the way, no, the replicator does not work the same way the Q do. If you’re curious, the manual is on the Armada server, and you can look it up.

Q considered it. He extricated himself from the chair and scooted over to the edge of the desk, so as to better amuse himself by reading the Captain’s PADD over his shoulder.

“Wow. Ops is really understaffed. Budget cuts, or did they all turn tail for the Maquis?”

“Dead.”

“Ah.”

“I _can_ kill you now, can’t I? Lore’s report was something else. But then, you’d just as soon break half the laws of spacetime as an afterthought. You’d beg and bleed and bend over and it would be an elaborate practical joke.” _And I’d fall for it,_ is what he was saying. Read between the lines. The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

“What? I–-okay. Yeah, joke on me, joke of the universe.”

“Indeed.”

“Look, it’s easy enough to prove if you want to get it over with.”

Suicide is taboo among the Q, and since we’re immortal, an amalgam, et cetera, it generally involves murder. By cutting Q off and committing him to a less than ordinary life on Picard’s Luxury Space Yacht, the Continuum had already killed him once.

“No. Not in cold blood,” Picard said calmly. “Not because I don’t like you.”

“Oh, so you _do_ care!”

“There are other captains of the Armada who would not be so accommodating. I was thinking, I’m not the only one who’d want to kill you. You’re here for protection.”

“You wouldn’t want to be alone in a shuttlecraft out here, I’m sure.”

“Alone?”

Shit.

“The Continuum kicked you out, again,” Picard could be so astute. “Exiled you. For what?”

Q folded his arms. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Not yet, at least. Do you really think Q won’t read your mind? Do you really think he won’t stack the deck, and count the cards, and pull the chips from thin air, all while you’re looking at him? He will, if he can, but he couldn’t just at that moment.

“Fine. If the Continuum wants to punish you–-both of us, really…”

“Don’t take it so personally. I chose this.”

“ _You_ chose–-?”

“I could have been anything with a mortal coil, Picard. So yes. Here I am. With you.”

Picard’s sigh was more like a growl. “That sounds personal, Q.”

“You have a story like this, don’t you? The gods abandon their wild, wayward witch daughter to an island where she lives among beasts and seduces a wandering war hero…?”

“You’re no Circe. You’re–-Achilles, sulking in his tent, if we’re going there. Or Scylla. Charybdis.”

There was a notch across the bridge of his nose that struck again at his eyebrow, silvery smooth. He smelled of agarwood and salt and fear-sweat, and it occurred to Q that they were frightened of each other, and that he had no idea what Picard was thinking.

Here’s a little more context for you: it was, without question, personal. It’s not uncommon for Q or unavoidable or even related to biology, although it had become assuredly biological in this instance. You don’t live a billion years without making a few mistakes. It’s just, Q was the only true thing Picard had ever seen, and Q liked him back.

Nothing ever happens for a reason. There are only predictable patterns. Q would know.

“Q?” Picard looked up from his PADD. Linear time is a bitch--Q had zoned out completely, staring at Picard’s cut up face like a horny archaeologist on Tagus III.

“Charybdis, Captain Obvious? No. I am now a man, and if a greater allegory for natural disaster exists, I haven’t heard of it,” Q replied fiercely. “This has happened before, in another universe, I promise you. That’s why they–-mm. It doesn’t matter.”

“A man,” Picard mused. “In another universe. Another life. Tell me then, Q. In the other universe… what did I do with you?”

Q flushed, and cleared his throat, and wiped his palms on the legs of his ugly civilian jumpsuit. “That’s cheating,” he complained. “Use your brain, Picard.”

When you think, electrical impulses in your brain create a reality. It’s a very physical act. _What do you want me to do with you?_

_#_

_“What do you want, Q?”_

_#_

Everything, every movement, was laborious, as if the blanket over him was made of lead and not Armada-issue quadrocotton. Each involuntary action of his body cut to the very center of his awareness but the effort to keep his own eyes open was worst of all. Q had been made mortal before, many times, even, but not exactly like this.

In summary, the command Picard enjoyed over himself and his crew and his ship had become astonishing.

The Captain’s order had been to throw Q in the brig. For now. Pending further discussion among the senior officers. So, he was curled on the cot with no choice but to _wait_ , intent on wallowing in his own abject misery. The _Enterprise_ ’s brig in this continuity was windowless, black, and comprised of blocks of three cells three meters square open to a series of modular central chambers. The occupied cells were locked with energy barriers that shimmered like fuel slick. Q couldn’t see the other prisoners, and the cell opposite him was apparently being used for storage. It was cluttered with crates and bits of broken or disused hardware, a sharp contrast to the austerity of the rest of the brig.

Q opened his eyes to the sound of one of the crates being dragged across the floor. He had the distinct sense that some time had passed, although with no omniscience and no chronometer, it was hard to say how long he’d been unconscious. He groaned, and squeezed his eyes shut.

“My brother told me you were here.”

A familiar voice, identical to Lore Soong’s save for the blessed lack of contempt. Q sat up, excruciatingly, blinking sunspots from his eyes. Blood rushed to his head and he nearly passed out again.

“Data!”

The android twin glanced up from the multi-layered readout on his PADD. “He says you are human. My analysis corroborates his assessment.”

“Yeah,” Q wrapped the blanket around himself, if only to hide the horrible jumpsuit, and how much his stomach was hurting him. “I can corroborate further. It’s a real pain in the ass.”

Data gingerly sat down on the crate, which he’d pulled so that it was directly in front of Q’s cell. “I would not know. I lack the personal experience necessary to empathize with your situation.”

Q sighed. “Can you, then, maybe, find it in your heart let me out of here anyway? I’m _bored._ And I keep _shaking_.”

“You are in shock.”

“Shock?” Q repeated, uselessly.

“The trauma of being transposed to a relatively simple alien body. Your new neurological system is not equipped to handle the amount of information you are accustomed to, so it follows that you are still adjusting. It is as if my own neural net was linked to a chisel and I could communicate only through xylography.”

“A what?”

“A practice developed on Old Earth for impressing words or images on to paper with the use of carved wooden blocks. There are many instances of congruent–-”

“I don’t care! I don’t care. I can’t–-you’re right, Data, I can’t think.” Q dropped his head in his hands. “I hate this. Don’t talk to me about carving. No lithography.“

Data opened his mouth, perhaps to point out the differences between various Old Earth printing techniques, and reconsidered. “You are experiencing brain fog, severe anxiety, low blood sugar, and you are dehydrated.”

“I’m dying,” Q muttered. “And Picard won’t even talk to me.”

“You are a civilian prisoner,” Data said, impassive. “The Captain must attend first to matters conducive to the operations of the ship.”

“Yeah, about that. I want a uniform.”

Data blinked, processing. “That is impossible.”

“A red one. This––” Q gestured to his offensively taupe jumpsuit. “Is not my color.”

“Only an individual enlisted with the Imperial Armada may wear an Armada uniform.”

“Enlist me! I’m here, ready and willing, eager to serve.” Q crawled forward, hands and knees, to the shimmering barrier. “For all the good times we’ve had together, Data, a favor, come on.”

“I do not have the authority to do so.” Data stood, straightening his own uniform shirt neatly. The motion was practiced, artificial. “You will have to discuss it with Captain Picard.”

“But–-”

“It is my personal opinion that your vast experience would be an asset to this crew. However, I do not believe the advantage outweighs the disadvantages imposed by your unpredictable and contentious personality."

“You’re saying I’m annoying?”

“You do not ‘play well’ with others,” Data assented. “If you will excuse me.”

Q leaned back, staring at the ceiling as the door to the rest of the ship hissed shut. The black panelling was glossy and clean, and he could see his pathetic reflection staring back at him.

You might think that a supremely advanced species of amalgamate energy beings would exhibit unparalleled harmony, the very definition of _playing well with others,_ but it is not so with the Q. Even the least wise and foolish of us is unimaginably discordant, and not for the sake of it. Our first enemy is ourselves, and another is entropy. If we are not careful, we will become obscure, and vanish. Eternity is a very long time.

Q took that a little too far in the opposite direction, and some would agree, considering they exiled him from the Continuum. And for what? A trickster god is still a god, after all. He keeps the rest of his fellow gods on their toes.

I would say that the Continuum had made a grave mistake.

#

Q slept in his cell, fitfully, and dreamed. He dreamed of a tower with a spiral staircase and his family, the whole damned pantheon of them, painted on the walls and of reeds and of waking up on a riverbank, and tasting blood in the water. He knew everything, in the strange way we are all God in our dreams, and he knew that the walls were laughing at him, whispering behind their hands, watching.

He awoke and vomited pale bile that burned all the way up, cold sweat beading on his skin in the brig’s half-light. There were several people in the corridor and he flinched as they turned to him, their faces blurred and unrecognizable.

“He needs to be inoculated,” someone said. Female, with a steady voice. Q liked her instinctively, but she did not speak again.

“Take him to medbay, then.”

“I’ll warn Dr. Howard.”

“What for?” Another anonymous voice. The energy barrier disintegrated and Q pulled the blanket closer around him. “He’s just a human.”

#

Medbay was a world apart from the brig: all warm grays and soft tungsten lighting. Twenty-seven hyposprays later, Dr. Howard had him on an examination table, sleeves rolled up for easy access. She was, as in most instances, a wry, intelligent woman who kept to herself, although she looked tired and the coat she wore over her uniform was flecked with bleach and blood. He thought back to Picard’s PADD and the personnel/supply shortages, and decided he didn’t have the capacity to worry about it when the good doctor was poking and prodding him like a tribble bred for toxicity testing. She shone an arclight in his eyes and Q winced.

“Is that really necessary?”

“Reflexes are good,” she said, to the audio recorder. “No congenital impairments. Q, you’re healthy as a horse.”

“Horses have to be shot when they break a leg, doctor. Notoriously fragile creatures. Are you going to put me out of my misery?"

Beverly slapped him across the face with the same clinical expression she’d had while giving him his shots. Q gasped.

“I thought the first tenet of medicine is _do no harm?!”_

“He's lucid.” She turned to the officer observing the exam. “What do you think, Commander?”

This woman–-Commander Deanna Riker—-she of the low, calming voice that Q had liked in the brig—-was sitting with her bare legs crossed in one of the visitor chairs, looping her braid absently around one hand, over and over. She arched an eyebrow.

“I do not detect any patterns of psychopathy or sociopathy from him, Beverly. He is terrified, lost, and confused, but there is no murderous intent.”

“Hey!”

“It seems he truly believes he is absolved of blame, even now. He certainly has a victim complex.” Deanna stood and Q recoiled in spite of himself. She was tall and taller in the strapless acrylic heels she wore. Any red-or-green-blooded man would be intimidated.

“If we’re done with this _interrogation_ \--”

“Give him a psych eval before the meeting tomorrow.” Deanna flipped her braid over her shoulder. “I’ll be posting a guard to his cell. We can’t have him becoming a suicide.”

“I’m not–-” Q protested. “There’s no way I was seriously thinking--”

“We often consider suicide when we desire to escape a situation and see no other alternative,” Deanna said gently. “To wake up from a bad dream. It is a self-soothing fantasy that will only cause you pain.” Her eyes met his. “Q, what happened? Why did the Continuum excommunicate you, what punishment is this?”

“Well. You remember Farpoint?”

“The waystation at Deneb IV. We met you, and you assisted in the liberation of an advanced alien not so unlike yourself.”

Dr. Howard cleared her throat. “Assisted is a strong word.”

“Yeah, the megasiphonophore. They’re all right, for space jellyfish. Good in bed.” Q brightened. “That’s all you remember?”

“I… yes,” Deanna said, carefully. “I take it there’s something else?”

Q rubbed his eyes and looked upwards, as if the medbay ceiling would open up and the Continuum might throw him a bone from the heavens. “Something else. Yeah, let’s say something else. It’s probably triple-X classified or whatever. Ask your Captain.” He grinned, and for a second there was a flash of real delight between his teeth. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

#

He spent that night on the floor with his back against the wall, unable or unwilling to sleep again. It may have been nerves, or it might’ve been the six cups of sweet black tea he’d convinced his assigned guard to order for him from the replicator.

#

“This is an alternate reality,” Q said, clapping his hands together for emphasis. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”

The faces of the senior officers seated at the briefing room table––which was beautifully patterned, by the way, with a surface that may have been polished agate, or petrified wood--were uniformly blank, so perhaps they hadn’t, in fact, noticed.

“S-chn T-gai Spock wrote of this in his manifesto,” Data supplied, stumbling over the difficult name. “The discovery of another universe by the first ISS _Enterprise_ under the command of Captain Tiberius Kirk had a profound effect on him. The promise of another world was what he--”

“Turned and bit the hand of the Empire for,” Lore finished for him.

“Yes,” Picard waved this away. “Is that what you’re referring to, Q?”

Q was standing in front of the assembled panel of Picard’s favorite people, feeling dramatically underprepared. In addition to the Soong twins, Dr. Howard was there, along with pilot-turned-Chief Engineer LaForge, Commander Riker, and the First Officer Ro Laren, a wiry young Bajoran with an axe to grind.

“Maybe,” Q nodded. “I assume so. You can’t expect me to answer all of your questions without my powers, and, um. I really don’t want to get involved in politics.”

“But you will try,” Ro said venomously. “Correct?”

“Correct. So. I’ll start with where I’m coming from, and go from there. I said this is an alternate reality, but let me amend. There are infinite realities, reflecting endlessly in an ectodimensional prism. Some are more alike than others. I have an intimate understanding, we can circle back in another meeting–-the Continuum is a part of all of it, in some ways. That is what the universe is. It’s—-” Q paused for effect. “An aspect of Q. We are the universe.”

“And they kicked me out,” he continued. “Q. That’s plural. My—-you could call them my family.”

“Why?”

He was ready for that. “Why don’t you tell the class, Jean-Luc?”

Picard interlaced his fingers. There was a pretentious ring on his left index finger, fat and shining and set with a yellow diamond. “I don’t know what you expect me to say,” the Captain answered, and Q could only gape. “You have compared our Empire to, I quote, a slime mold. You have also called us an inferior savage child-race, and other epithets I won’t repeat. My only guess is that your Continuum disproved of your behavior, understandably, but I hardly expect them to care about our well-being.”

“ _This isn’t about the Borg._ Farpoint? Spring break on the South Island? Any of this ringing a bell?” Q wagged his hand in a pantomime of ringing a bell. Without the ability to bring in the sound of a 16th century French cathedral at the top of the hour, it didn’t have quite the same effect.

“Enough, Q. I do not remember, you will have to entertain us with an explanation.”

“Oh,” Q chewed the inside of his cheek, buying time. He paced to the row of transalum windows, and back, and to the windows again. “I see what happened. I thought–-well, the last time I was here, I just thought we weren’t talking about it.”

“Talking about _what_ , Q?”

“You really don’t remember?”

“Obviously not.”

“And you really want me to say it?”

“Yes!” Picard snapped. “Damn it, Q, we don’t have all day. Nor do you.”

Q frowned. “Low blow, Picard.”

“Q!”

All eyes were on him. The _Enterprise_ was in orbit around a dull little moon without a name. Far below, the craters pitted across its face resembled shadows over a white sea, and Q looked away before he felt too much like falling. “At Farpoint… you helped the megasiphonophore, at the expense of your own petty trade interests. You figured it out all on your own, too. Didn’t need me.” Q stopped. “This is embarrassing.”

“It won’t kill you,” Picard said. He was straight-backed in his chair, alert despite his bored tone, a cup of coffee untouched and cooling by his PADD.

“And then I made a gamble, wove _you_ into the Continuum, we had the most _incredible_ mindblowing cosmic sex, and nobody took it well.”

The last part was said all in one breath, as though getting it over with quickly might make it sound any less unflattering. It had been easy, at the time, to perform the mental gymnastics necessary to convince himself it wasn’t a rebound, but that’s exactly what it was, wasn’t it? The man who had first puzzled out the temporal anomaly was not interested in power nor the moral questions it seemed to pose for him, and he could not parse Q’s offer any other way. Q was used to rejection, and maybe after the way things had shaken out with the farce of a trial, he should’ve expected it. It still hurt, though.

“As I expected,” Picard said icily, “this is a waste of time. Lore, get rid of him. Feel free to be creative. If he’s lying, and he certainly is, it’s no loss. Dismissed.”

“I’m wounded, Jean-Luc! I open my heart to you, and this is what I get?” Q was grinning, a little frantic, bolstered by his own defiance. “You just said it wouldn’t kill me.”

“I know better than to listen to a mewling trickster god!” Picard brought his hand to the table with a _bang_ that made Q jump. The resulting silence was deafening.

“He’s telling the truth,” Deanna said quietly, after a long and hideous minute. “Or at least, he believes he is.”

“Shut up, Deanna.” This was Ro.

“Insanity,” Picard pinched the bridge of his scarred nose. “You expect me to take you at your word, for--”

“I gave you Q powers and got grounded.” There. Why hadn’t he left it at that in the first place?

“And you’re telling me the first thing I did with total power over the universe and all things was _sleep with you_?”

“Sort of. I’m flattered, really,” Q shrugged. “Thanks.”

“If that happened–-and I’m not saying it did--I should remember it.”

“Just one of those nights,” Q said blithely. He felt euphoric, although he’d just won a race through a black hole to rock bottom. _I should remember it._ Picard wasn’t totally off the mark, there. Being woven into the Continuum, and embraced, and then ripped out--we all felt it, we all remember, and saw fit to change the pattern of the weave after the fact. Immortality does not preclude a desire to experience agony for the sake of it.

Besides, there are worse uses for quasiomnipotence than blinkered displays of affection. This is what the Continuum was so mortally–-yes, you see what I did there--afraid of.

Commander LaForge, who had been politely tuning out as much of the conversation as possible, cleared his throat. “Captain. There may be a disconnect here. The Universal Translator is not equipped to deal with… gods. _Energy beings._ Even if they’ve been nerfed. I recommend we proceed according to the facts we have.”

Lore pulled a face and Ro’s eyes could’ve rolled right out of her skull, but Data nodded in agreement. “The Commander is right, Captain. Q is undeniably human at this time. We have not received any message or other sign from the Continuum in 48 hours, so it is safe to assume that, at the very least, they are in on the ‘joke’.”

Q colored himself impressed at the android’s ability to inflect air quotes.

“What I don’t understand,” LaForge continued, “Is why this is happening now. We were at Farpoint years ago, and the waystation’s been abandoned since then.”

“That one’s easy,” Q sighed, and finally sank into the empty chair at the foot of the table, reaching to pull Deanna’s PADD over, without asking, so he could check the date. “Mm. Yeah, the Continuum argued about what to do with me for two thousand of your solar years, give or take. If you'll recall, I was already homeless when we had our little escapade in the Tau Quadrant.”

"So this _is_ about the Borg."

He crossed his arms. “I am at your mercy, Captain. Sherlock over there thinks I could be an asset to the team, if that means anything to you. Given my literal billions of years of experience.”

“Yes,” Ro said, surprising everyone. Q felt his intestines contort themselves into an impossible, burning knot. “There’s no place here for a civilian. You’ll pull your weight, or you’ll die.” The Bajoran stood. Her earring sparkled in the low light, and Q couldn’t help but stare. “We do not need two thousand years to discuss this. I do not want him as my report. Captain, a matter requires my attention on Deck 11.”

“Dismissed,” Picard nodded once in assent. “Dr. Howard, Commander LaForge, Commander Lore, leave us.”

In the ensuing shuffle of chairs and gathering of electronics and empty mugs, Deanna turned to Q. Today her hair was done up in an elaborate bun, and without a braid to play with she was worrying a string of beads and animal teeth looped around her wrist. “Your feelings are genuine,” she said, conspiratorially, like she was telling him a secret he didn’t already know.

Maybe, Q realized, much later, that’s exactly what she was doing.

#

Q was assigned as a senior Science consultant, since his expertise spanned exobiology, exosociology, astroscience, quantum mechanics, and universal history, among other much more esoteric topics, and given a blue shirt. It would have been yellow, for Engineering/Ops, but Q complained so profoundly that Deanna had made a case for the general flexibility of the Science Division and that was that.

Two pips on his collar made him Lieutenant Q, which sounded so asinine he had to laugh. It made no sense, Data had said, to force him to start as an ensign. What would he do, scrub the shuttle bay? It was preposterous.

His handicap with regards to authority was such that a Command track was out of the question.

He was allowed his own quarters, too, a narrow gray room on the officer’s deck with a view overlooking the stern. The window spanned the entire far wall, and light from the nacelles bathed the room in a perpetual chrysanthemum glow that pulsed blindingly whenever the ship jumped to warp. The effect could be diminished by closing the blackout shades, but Q found he preferred not to. It kept him awake.

The quarters could only be described as Spartan. There was a bed, which Q avoided, a workdesk and chair, and an adjoining bathroom behind a sliding door that doubled as a full-length mirror. The mirror was both a source of angst and interest bordering on the obsessive.

It was an open, expressive face that he’d designed for himself. As a human, he was about forty-five years old, arguably handsome, taller and broader at the shoulders than Picard--his metric--with curling dark hair going gray at the temples. His eyes, without the Continuum behind them, were unremarkable, but his hands were beautiful. They seemed to have a life of their own and gesticulated constantly as he talked, audience or no.

And what else? The room became cluttered with debris and was never once clean after that. Q switched from tea to water and caffeine pills and buttery high-calorie rations meant for emergency use. Precarious stacks of dishes built up in corners, and pages from hard-copy reports drifted and fanned across the floor in no discernible order, tangled with dirty clothes. Although there was no lock on his door, Q did not leave. The SOP was--if you had something that needed review by the new academic expert from Sector 17, transfer it without comment and for the love of God never follow up.

This went on without incident for nine and a half days.


	3. The Last Resort & Spa

2368, Stardate 45782.5

The Sigma Quadrant

On the tenth day, Deanna Riker knocked on his door.

Q was in the shower, experimenting with the water setting. This was supposed to be special requisition only--not because it was impossible for the _Enterprise_ replicators to produce an endless supply of bathwater, but because doing so was a slight power drain--but a few tweaks to the code meant he could scald himself as much as he liked. 

He heard the knock, and studiously ignored it. He was typing a series of equations into a PADD for a Lieutenant who had dug up an ancient (to Q, contemporary, basic) theory on pentaquarks. The Lieutenant wanted to apply the theory to obsolete WMDs, because of course she did, because she was an Armada Academy graduate, but Q had ideas about stars that he thought would be more applicable in the long run.

“Q!” Deanna’s voice burst through the comm panel. “Are you there?”

What a question that was.

If Deanna was surprised to see him answer the door naked and dripping wet, there was no outward sign, though she gave him a very neutral once-over. She herself was wearing a sheer, square-cut robe over an old T-shirt, coupled with a bizarre pair of mules. Data was with her, in proper uniform.

“What?” Q asked. And then, “I’m busy.”

“You’re exhausted,” she corrected him. “Isolated and exhausted. I can sense your sorrow from my room. You are from an intimately social race, Q, you should not seclude yourself.”

Q leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms in what he hoped was a convincing display of apathy. “Deanna, we both know I’m only here because I’m a unique tactical advantage your Captain won’t share. I don’t need friends.”

“I beg to differ,” she took his arm and led him back inside his quarters. “Find something to wear, and let’s go.”

It was more difficult than he would’ve previously anticipated, Q realized, to refuse an indvidual like Deanna. For one thing, she was a firm ten on almost any scale you could draw up. Even if you preferred more than two legs, ineffable charisma followed her like a cloud--blurred at the edges, cool to touch, anticipatory and forgiving. It was totally unlike the aura of Q, or Q, or Q.

For another, his useless flesh prison was attracted to her, to the point that he thought about kicking Data out and making some use of the bed for once. Deanna laughed almost as soon as the thought emerged in his brain, and threw a pair of pants at him. “I’m married, love.”

“Where _is_ Number One?” Q asked as he dressed, grateful for the change of subject.

“He took command of Starbase Yorktown after an incident there. Captain Picard brings her back around every few cycles. Maybe you will join us then?” Deanna winked. Q couldn’t tell if she was serious, and lost his chance to respond one way or another when Data stepped on a plate.

“We are going to Ten Forward,” she announced, after an argument where Q insisted again that he was busy and Data read off every regulation against overtime from the Armada Handbook, in order of direct relevance.

“Oh, great,” Q groaned. “The bar.”

“We thought about showing you around the rest of the ship,” Deanna said, “but that felt like a work thing.”

“No need. I’ve seen it before.” The corridor to the turbolift was mercifully deserted. The lightstrips running along the floor were dimmed to thirty percent, and Q’s brow furrowed. “What… time, is it?”

“2132,” Data answered. “As Deanna has often said, ‘the night is still young.’”

#

They scouted a table in the farthest corner at Q’s insistence, right by the window bay, basking in the indigo-copper-rose glow of a passing nebula. For a Destroyer-Class starship, the _Enterprise_ was beautifully designed. Most purely functional spaces had ambient lighting that changed with the solar cycle, but whenever possible natural (or unnatural, depending on the circumstances) light was the touchstone of a room.

“She is the flagship, after all,” Deanna explained, following his gaze to _out there_. “Or, was.”

“Do you have to read my mind? Isn’t that an invasion of my privacy?”

“I am an empath, not a telepath,” she reminded him, not unkindly. “Your feelings are intense. Both positive and negative. It is a good sign.”

“You’re not trying to counsel me, are you?”

“No. Although, if you want to talk--”

“No,” Q said, too quickly.

This was when Data came back with their drinks and a sizzling circular tray of what was identified to Q as a ‘bar snack.’ The android sat next to Deanna, opposite Q, and raised his glass.

“Welcome,” he said simply.

Deanna tapped her glass on the table before raising it as well, and after a brief hesitation Q followed her lead. A moment later he was choking violently.

“What is this stuff?!” Q took a napkin Data offered him, wiping spit and alcohol from his face. “It’s awful.”

“Synthehol,” Data answered. “40% by volume, mixed with almond syrup, lemon juice, and sugar.”

Q perked up at ‘sugar’ and had another exploratory sip before taking the rest, gamely, like a shot. “Hm.”

Deanna and Data stared at him in amazement, but what for? You don’t live a billion years without having a few drinks.

Another round or three later and Q was sprawled sideways in the chair, licking barbeque sauce from his fingers so he could pick up the pitcher and pour himself a glass of water.

“Q,” Deanna was saying. She was like a girl at a slumber party, eyes bright, arms wrapped around her knees. “Tell us about the other _Enterprise._ You mentioned Captain Picard saved the world?”

Q thought about it. Yes, he’d mentioned that, but in the week and a half since being stranded on the bridge, he’d digested so much random and novel information that the details of his previous existence were getting fuzzy. Or maybe that was the synthehol talking.“That’s not important,” he said.

“The end of the universe as we know it, not important?” Deanna laughed. Q liked that she could laugh, about this. It _was_ funny.

“No,” Q agreed. “We’re still here.” He snapped his fingers, and was aghast when the bottle of synthehol--molded to look like a Rigelian sand-olm--on the table didn’t move. “Pass me the--”

Data passed him the bottle, and Q continued, “The other _Enterprise_ … let me put it this way. I read the manifesto, which, big mistake. Vulcans are _so_ boring after _Kolinahr.”_ He swallowed another mouthful of synthehol. “How do I say this…? It was different. It was fine.”

“It’s where you met the Captain, isn’t it?”

Q ignored the poisonous barb in the question. She was right, but, well. _“_ It was the world the Revolution dreamed of, and it wasn’t perfect.”

The profundity of this truism lulled him to meditative silence. Q turned the synthehol bottle over and over in his hands, watching the light of the nebula play across the liquor like streaks of paint. Strange details. It shouldn’t be possible, to see things like this in a shitty Sigma Quadrant dive. And yet. Q felt his eyes prick with tears, and he rubbed them with the heel of his palm. And yet he felt better than he had in a long time. Deanna and Data were still talking, but the ebb and flow of their conversation was far away, tangled with the low thrum of music and general noise of the bar.

The glass eye of the sand-olm rolled in its socket, and blinked.

“Q?” Deanna was trying to get his attention. “Hey. _Enterprise_ to Q?”

It occurred to Q that he had misjudged his alcohol tolerance.

“I’m drunk,” Q said. Articulating this caused the room to tilt sharply starboard and into a spin. “Good branding,” he added, toasting again with the entire bottle. “I’m taking this.”

He got up, and the ship banked farther. Q tripped and caught himself on the armrest of Deanna’s chair. Her eyes widened with concern that flickered to sober amusement. “The restroom’s that way, on the left,” she said, nodding in the general direction. “Data, go with him.”

“No, no, I can find my way,” Q insisted, and promptly wandered off, skirting tables and trying not to make eye contact with anyone.

It felt like floating, or like being in a music holo. He was a world apart fromTen Forward, passing unseen among silhouettes of the _Enterprise_ ’s dispossesed crew making the least of their night off, stepping on their shadows, watching from behind a one-way mirror. It was the best he’d felt in days, centuries, even.

The restroom was tiled in glossy black with four stalls and a sink like a trough. Q set the bottle of synthehol on the ledge above the sink, gave it a second thought, and picked it up again.

He shut himself in the stall third-farthest from the door and promptly sat on the toilet, leaning sideways so his forehead rested on the cool metal partition. He just needed a minute of peace and quiet, and then he’d go back.

Yeah, right.

The bottle twisted fully in on itself and came to life. Writhing glass slipped through his hands and grew in a cacophony of broken tile and metal until it filled the room, a perfect, scintillating ghost of a Rigelian sand-olm, down to the second jaw.

“Leave me alone,” Q said hoarsely. He’d scarcely moved, although he was examining his empty hands as if the bottle would reappear.

The glass alien opened its mouths in a yawn. “You should be more grateful that I’ve gone out of my way to check on you. You look like shit."

“Thanks,” Q glanced up. “Is that Q or Q? I can’t tell you apart anymore, you know.”

“Q,” I answered. In another flash I was humanoid as well, although, I couldn’t resist, I was in Captain’s red, all pips in place. Blue really wasn’t Q’s color, either.

Of course it was me! Who else cared enough to have been stalking him for ten days on a miserable Armada ship, the one where they cut your throat in lieu of a performance review? It wasn’t Q, I assure you.

“Right.” Q swallowed. “Come to take me back?”

“You really are drunk,” I said, and reduced his blood alcohol content to zero with a whim. We’d have been there all night, otherwise.

“If you’re not here with an olive branch, why?” Q’s mouth turned up in a shadow of a smile--there was an echo of his pet Picard there. How the mighty fall, indeed.

“Would you believe me if I told you I was sorry?” I asked.

Q sneezed in disbelief. I’d managed to break every fixture in the room, and the dust was still settling.

“The Continuum isn’t,” I continued. “They’re content for you to be worm food.”

“They say that every time,” Q said, from his seat on the toilet. He scratched at the scab on his neck where his Universal Translator chip had been implanted the week before. “I’m not so far gone that I’ve forgotten. How do I get out of this?”

“You don’t.”

“Does the Continuum know you’re here?”

“They don’t care. Like I said, worm food. The only reason I even recall who you are is because they don’t want anyone to try that stunt of yours again.”

“I don’t see why not. The Continuum will love him once they get to know him.”

My patience is infinite, and I was losing it. “You’ve been bafflingly irregular over Jean-Luc Picard, Q, and we put up with that. Believe it or not we were happy that you were happy, for once in your eternal life. This is different, and you know why.”

“Why? How is it different than adopting Q?”*

“ _I gambled, wove you into the Continuum, we had mindblowing cosmic sex, and I lost,_ ” I said, using his voice. “Q, you set yourself up.”

“So you’re saying the Continuum is all in knots because--”

“Because this is not an orphaned intern. This is a man who was born into a genocidal pangalactic Empire that’s since been torn to ribbons by a military coup, and he is the Captain of their flagship, and, anyway, we all agree it’s too much trouble.”

Q laughed. He laughed, and doubled over laughing, and stayed like that, head in his hands. “Oh, Q. You are so young. You sound just like me.”

I am only twenty-one million point six seven years younger, and he has never let me forget it.

“So black and white, in your thinking,” Q continued. “But you almost never come to this part of the universe. I wanted you to. I thought you’d…” He trailed off. “I have an idea.”

“Oh, no.”

Q grinned. “Let’s play a game.”

I should have known. There was no point whining to the Continuum like _what you did to Q isn’t fair!_ or _he told me to tell you he’s sooo sorry._ They love a wager, though. Dice, the universe, and all that. I love it, too.

“You and me?” I crossed my arms, intrigued, static crackling on my skin.

“Why not? You, me, and the Continuum.” Q got up, finally, and clapped his hands. How was it that he could be flesh and blood, a glorified holobiont, and fill a room? “The trial’s over for humanity, Q. I propose a test for the Continuum.”

“How do you expect to manage that as a Lieutenant in Picard’s Armada?”

Q draped an arm over my shoulders. “Q, Q, Q. Think about it carefully. Worm food, you said. The Continuum doesn’t care what happens to me? I don’t believe it. I wouldn’t be here. _You_ wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I admitted, shrugging him off, though I caught his sleeve to keep him close. He stank of testosterone and iron.

“I bet the Continuum won’t let me die.”

It was a nice idea. Elegant in its simplicity, and who would have dared but the wisest and most foolish of us? I had a notion of how it would end, and at worst it would be entertaining. “For as long as you live?”

“I _promise_ I won’t go looking for cheap thrills,” Q said. “No risk-seeking behavior. Scout’s honor.”

“And you won’t try to kill yourself again?”

Q held a finger to his lips with a smile. “Not in the cards.” A pause. “You were worried about me, weren’t you?”

“In your dreams,” I said, which is a funny thing for a Q to say, I know. 

“They won’t be able to help themselves.” He kissed me, once, on my brow, and snapped his fingers. “Now, go. Get off this ship.”

I left him asleep, dreamless, in his quarters. It was a respite we both needed after the monotony and the stress and the binge-drinking. I thought about the odds of the bet. I thought about the properties of synthehol, and wondered if he could spit in the proverbial face of the Continuum because he had been Q, or if it was something he’d learned from Picard.

Grotesque, to think so.

I lingered in Ten Forward a little longer, after, but no one spoke of Q again.

#

Time passed. It was early the next morning, or the next month, when Q awoke safe in his bed. The _Enterprise_ was at impulse power for the sake of observing a phenomenon LaForge had dubbed Space Snow--essentially, lightyears of chaff--and the void beyond the window was pleasantly muted.

The thick and murderous aura of a hangover soured the mood somewhat. Q groaned, and gagged, and nobly swallowed a mouthful of regurgitated synthehol before he could choke on it. He rolled over, and found the spot beside him refreshingly cold, and mercifully empty. The pentaquark Lieutenant had been gracious enough not to spend the night.

Oh? You thought Q–-any Q--would be monogamous?

That does not mean Q knew the pentaquark Lieutenant’s name.

He groped for his PADD on the floor and stared down at it. It was 0510. After an hour of trying to get back to sleep, it was 0513, and at 0513.2 he was in the bathroom, throwing up.

The PADD chimed from where it had been buried under the sheets.

“I’m up!” Q barked, at the PADD. “I’m up… hey, should’ve bet that the Continuum would just kill me, am I right or am I right?” A pause. “Are you listening?”

I was. I did not respond. Q pushed himself through a semblance of a morning routine: washing, preening, worrying at the inside his ears. An array of painkillers and hypos from the replicator passed for breakfast.

His existence had become so boring.

The notification on the PADD was from Captain Picard. Q stared at it, muted the thing, and deliberately forgot about it. A few Ensigns were running a biology experiment involving the eusocial weevil infestation in the bulkheads on Deck 24, and he was giving them advice on idol worship. This, coupled with a report on trilithium crystal efficiency, occupied him until noon.

He was in the middle of explaining the finer points of temporal causality loops to an audio recorder and sketching a diagram of something entirely unrelated when the door to his quarters opened abruptly, revealing the elder Soong twin.

“Don’t you ever knock?” Q didn’t look up from his drawing. “I might have been indecent.”

“How lucky for me.” Lore threaded his way across the room like his brother’s cat, from one patch of uncluttered floor to the next. About a third of the way in he stopped, eyes on the wall where Q had pasted an array of printouts and hand-written notes in a sort of fractal kanban board. In some cases, Q’d written directly on the wall in white marker.

“You’d make good use of a neural net,” Lore said, after a moment.

“I doubt it. Too much nuance gets lost in binary code. It’s already been a nightmare, dwindling as I have from a _carte des phares_ to the paradox of meat.” Q bit the end of his stylus, eyes dancing. “The Captain sent you?”

“Or the holodeck.” Lore continued. “It isn’t difficult to write your own program. I’m sure you would find it useful.”

“Why are you giving me advice?”

The android considered his answer. “The Captain sent me,” he said at last. “And my brother said something interesting about you the other day. I haven’t been able to shake it, you know how it is?”

“No, I don’t. What did Data say about me?”

“You can ask him yourself,” Lore replied, and Q threw the stylus at his head. Petty, and fruitless, but satisfying.

“I don’t care about the holodeck.”

It was true. Q had avoided the holodeck since Deanna’s impromptu ship tour. There was no reason to spend any time preoccupied with fantasy--after eons of the real thing, the Armada’s best jerkoff tech fell rather flat.

“It has its uses, as a tool.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“Your brother,” Q started, probing a new subject. “He’s much kinder than you. A better person, if that’s what you’re into. Why is that?”

For a heartbeat or two, it looked as if Lore would hit him again. His eyes blazed, and his lip curled over perfect white teeth. Then he stepped back, once, in deference to Q’s nonsensical rank, and there was the Mona Lisa smile again.

“Yes. A better _person_. Can you imagine it, Q, wanting to be human?”

“It wouldn’t be my first choice,” Q said, although, it really had been. _I could have been anything with a mortal coil, Picard. So, here I am. With you_.

“Exactly.” Lore spat. “Come.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. You had a 1:1 scheduled with the Captain at 1030, and you missed it.”

Q glanced at his PADD, which was face-down on the bed. “Did I?”

#

Yes, Q had been avoiding Picard for the past however many days, but he needn’t have bothered. Without the big guns of the Armada behind her, the _Enterprise_ required constant attention, as if she were a bird too spoiled, too tame, to survive in the wild. Captaining her kept the man busy, to say the least.

Furthermore, Q's problem-solving became incoherent in the face of factors like risk management or major laws of physics and he was summarily banned from the bridge: he hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day operations of the ship at all. It was safer to keep him tied up with R&D hypotheticals.

Safer, in theory.

“I am aware it was foolish to expect better of you, Q, but really--” Picard slid a PADD across the antique modernist table between them. “I can’t have you rebuilding Genesis.”

Q recognized the pentaquark Lieutenant’s report on the geminated screen.

“She submitted that?”

“No doomsday weapons. That is an order.”

They were in the Observation Lounge, alone. Picard had poured them both coffee in an inspired effort of professionalism. Q was on his second cup, although by now it was mostly milk and sugar. Likewise, icy chaff outside was so dense that all they could see was a flat, throbbing orange, the color of a sandstorm. It made the room oddly claustrophobic.

“The Captain of the Imperial Armada’s former flagship,” Q mused. “And you don’t want Death?”

“Does that surprise you?”

Q leaned back, crossing an ankle over his knee. “Nothing surprises me anymore, _mon capitaine._ I’m curious, though, since I’m not _in_ on the scope of your reasoning--penny for your thoughts?”

It was easy to imagine the coins flicking between his fingers.

“This is a warship, isn’t it?”

Picard ran a hand over his scalp, gaze fixed firmly on the windows: the sienna glow, the chaff sticking to the transalum and melting away. It really was like snow. “Yes.”

“So…? You’re far from Imperial space. Don’t you need protection? A deterrent can go a long way.”

“Imperial space is much more dangerous than the Sigma Quadrant.”

“Well, there you go. Your Empire is overrun with terrorists and insurgents. Klingons. Lizard people. Every man for himself.” Q willed Picard to look at him. “That’s why we’re out here off the beaten path, isn’t it, Captain?”

“Three years ago, you threw us to the Borg,” Picard said. “A warning, you said, for what’s out here. I should be able to take a bloody nose.”

Q choked slightly on his milk and sugar, ears burning. “You’re dodging the question.”

“Playing God with us didn’t work out for you, Q. Do you really think I’d make the same mistake?”

“I,” Q bit his lip. “You read into that a lot more than--it’s not that deep.”

“That’s your problem, you don’t even realize. We were arrogant then. Look at us now. Look at _you._ ” Picard’s disappointment was palpable. “I will not bluff with an empty hand. We were the both of us powerless against the Continuum.”

“You’re not being fair, Jean-Luc. I am well aware of my limits.”

“Enough with the planet-killers, then.”

“Touché.”

They both sighed, and Q took the opening, already halfway out of his chair. “Love not bombs. Copy that. Crystal clear. If that’s all—”

“Q, wait.”

Q flinched and sat back down, reluctantly. The Captain had picked up the PADD and was deleting a string of new messages that had appeared over the course of their conversation. “You have me at a disadvantage,” he said, without looking up.

“No need to spare my feelings, Picard. We both know the Continuum isn’t going to come back for me--I’m stuck here. Don’t worry your bald head about them.” _You can order me around as much as you like, just try it, what would you have me do?_ is what he was going to say next.

Picard nodded absently. “If it is a test, it’s beyond me. But that isn’t what I meant.”

“Oh.”

Silence crept over them and stretched on and on, as if the weevil colony had mobilized from the bulkheads to their bones and would start crawling out of their mouths if they spoke again. Every hair on Q’s body was standing on end. Why oh why had he been the one to bring up _feelings_?

“It seems my best memories of you are gone,” Picard said, after an eternity. “Or that they belong to someone else.”

“Just forget it--”

“No. You said that this has happened before, that there is another--copy, clone, what have you, of me, one that you… have a vested interest in.” There was bitterness in his voice, and mortal confusion, but there was curiosity, too.

“It’s not like that. There’s no point in being jealous, Picard, you’re always _you.”_

“I certainly don’t claim to understand.” Picard frowned as his PADD _dinged_ again. “Can you help me? For my own education.”

“I may as well try to describe a color you can’t see.”

“What if you ran into a copy of yourself from another universe? Wouldn't that bother you?”

Q rolled his eyes. “Impossible for a Q. I told you, it’s not as if there’s literally more than one universe. Not from the Continuum’s perspective.”

“Be that as it may. You also said there is another… time, where this is a ship of peace. What had changed, to make it so?”

“I can’t take you there, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Q.”

“Yes?”

“I am asking you about our relationship.”

Picard’s full attention was on Q, now, and Q felt a pin go slowly through his heart and stick him to the floor. The Captain of the Imperial Armada’s flagship was leaning forward, hands loosely clasped, twisting his yellow diamond ring, a shadow with mirror eyes. Q was just another bug under a microscope.

“Would you believe me if I said it’s complicated?”

“I would be shocked if it was anything but,” the shadow said. “Just one of those nights, Q?”

“Why would I lie about that?” Q asked, exasperated. “Hey, the Continuum? Time, space, and Q? I wasn’t kidding when I said they were pissed. Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke. Count your lucky stars.”

“Are you one of them?”

“Don’t be ironic.”

“I’m not. It seems I am fortunate to have escaped your favor with my life.” Picard thought a moment. “Will it happen again?”

“This is an abuse of power, you know.”

Picard laughed at that. “Q, you’re an immortal entity, present quandary aside. I’m just your commanding officer.”

Q smiled, faintly. “We weren’t even friends, Jean-Luc.”

“I hope not!” Picard laughed again, sharply, caustic. “Q, you’re being so serious. It’s not like you.”

“I’m picking up your bad habits.”

“I see,” Picard said, and there it was, the shift in the current between them to something darker, and Q couldn’t name what it was. “Thank you, Q, I think I understand.”

“Do you? I—”

“I have an appointment with Commander Ro.” The Captain stood, shoulders back, head high. “Be sure to destroy your notes on Genesis.”

“Yes,” Q said automatically, trying to follow him to the turbolift, “but--”

“However wickedness outstrips men, it has no wings to fly from God,” Picard’s breath was hot on his neck, and then he was gone.

#

“I told you so,” Q said, to the empty room.

#

It was child’s play to delete the Genesis data from the Armada’s secure server, or rather, it was once Data showed him a funny trick with the automated archive. When Q was done with it there were no backups of the project anywhere in the galaxy, and he’d wiped a civilization’s worth of weapons R&D on top of that, old files the Revolution had turned a blind eye to.

Of course this did nothing, meant nothing, vital intelligence would be stored locally, the Imperial missile stockpiles went untouched insofar as they were likely in the hands of the Cardassians. But, Q had a feeling that access to anything out-of-use or in concept would be at least snarled, and more importantly, it was something to do.

And then: that was it. It was done, and Q’s PADD read 0400, and anyone up would be on Gamma shift. Or they were Data and Lore. Or they were as distraught and distracted and as much of an insomniac as Q was, and wouldn’t want to hear about his stupid personal problems.

He flopped onto the bed, boots on, and stared fixedly at the middle distance below the ceiling.

What had gone so wrong, so fast, with Picard? What had he said, what had changed? Q couldn’t remember how they’d gone from moralizing over deterrence, to the other _Enterprise,_ to that really bad one-time thing.

The other--as if there weren’t infinite _Enterprise_ s. As if the Continuum hadn’t thrown an anomaly puzzle at so many of them, different every time, like dropping a teacup just to see it break, or reconstitute again, or bounce, because it’s just plastic.

The trial was never about testing humanity. We just wanted to see what Q would do.

Q moaned and rolled over, tangling his fingers in his hair, hiding his face in his arms. Picard and his ridiculous notions of equity. Picard, toying with him, quoting Shakespeare. Picard asking about their _relationship._ He’d pulled something grossly misshapen out of Q and left it like a tumor bleeding on the floor, because he didn't want it.

_We weren’t even friends._

A deflection, yes, but not untrue.

_Will it happen again?_

No, never. They had confirmed that, at least, in so many words. Picard was a responsible man, and the Continuum was a threat, in the way that a hurricane is a threat unless you chart a course the long way around, through doldrums and drought. You do not escape death going the long way. Maybe that was the point.

He could still feel Picard’s breath on his skin, wasn’t that fucked up? Millenia upon millenia of experiences, and he was still all hot and bothered, irradiating angst, rutting into the mattress like that would help.

“Wickedness outstrips men, my ass,” Q muttered.

His cock twitched and thickened in his hand, velvet-soft, leaking precum that Q tasted experimentally before thrusting his own fingers in his mouth with a low moan. As far back as they’d go wasn’t far enough: he struggled to all fours, touching the back of his throat, gagging, trying it again, feeling under his tongue, the ridges of his teeth. He closed his lips and his fingers slid in and out over smooth flesh.

_We were arrogant then. Look at us now._

_Yes,_ Q gave up with an exhale, eyes open, propped on his elbows, tracing a line of spittle down his chin. _Look at_ me _._ He massaged the cartilage of his nose, wondering what it would feel like, broken.

He sat up, trying and failing to steady his breathing, trying not to stare at his swollen dick, deep red like a bruise in the dark. His uniform trousers hobbled around his boots. His pale thighs. His fussily trimmed pubic hair.

For all that Q bitched and whined about the inconvenience of his human body and the distractions and its need for constant attention, the traumatic bit of it was that these actions had become uncontrollable. The Continuum is sacrosanct and undying, we only answer to each other, though we may play in forms great and small. Now Q’s body was as much a part of him as his mind, and he had to answer to it.

“Fuck.” He ran the wet pad of his thumb over his tip, eyes fluttering shut again. His hand wasn’t the right size, wasn’t callused in the right places, but if he could at least be rough in the right way, if he could stop himself from fucking his hand like a dog, then--well.

There are all kinds of pleasure to be had in the universe, would you believe it? The Continuum has been exalted, and it has been degraded at the molecular level, because there is as much to be enjoyed as God as a single cell dividing and dividing in the sea.

It keeps us young.

Q came biting on his free hand, shuddering silently through it like someone had taken a stun knife to his sternum. He stayed there, in an afterglow closer to a migraine aura than anything, come cooling on his abdomen, and he felt miraculously worse than before.

#

That night, or morning, Q dreamed he was an executioner in an old country in the throes of the first thaw of spring. He stood ankle-deep in a fountain, axe in hand, and picked coins out of the water like grapes.

#

The El-Aurian was in Ten Forward.

Specifically, she was behind the bar, polishing a trendy angular glass with a cloth, and she hadn’t seen him yet.

Q’s guess (or, his hope) had been that she wasn’t on the ship in this timeline, that she’d been assimilated with the rest of her planet when the Borg chewed through her home system, but he’d been wrong before.

El-Aurians are a race of shapeshifters, but they’re clever about it: whatever you expect to see is what you’ll get with them. Humans would see her as a humanoid, Bajorans would see a Bajoran, and so on. What Q saw was an echo of what he had once seen through the Continuum’s lens.

It is indescribable given your frame of reference, so, please: imagine the woman you know.

She turned her radiant head, and caught him staring, and the glass broke in her hand.

“ _You._ ”

“Hi, Guinan,” Q backpedaled towards the exit, and bumped into someone’s chair instead. “I’ll, how about, I have to run, let’s catch up later?”

She placed the shards of broken transalum on the counter, one by one, arranging them in a line. “Sit, Q.”

Q sat. The bar was quiet at this hour, electro-rock switched out for a gentle neoclassical concerto, and no one had given them a second glance. The _Enterprise_ had left the snow behind long weeks ago. Outside, space was black and blazing.

“I’m supposed to meet Deanna,” he started. And then, “I didn’t know you were here.”

“You’ve come a long way.”

“You have no idea,” Q twisted on his bar stool, eyeing the backlit shelves of liquor behind her. “When was it we last saw each other? Talos? Zaoomora?”

“Zima II,” she corrected him, and Q nodded unconvincingly. 

“Right, I thought so.”

Guinan had procured another glass and was pouring from a white ceramic bottle until the liquid swelled at the rim, a perfect convex disc of cherry red. She pushed it to Q.

“It’s the real stuff. Be careful.”

“You always were a troublemaker,” Q said, and tapped the glass on the counter before swallowing. He’d been doing that, and he couldn’t say why--a thoughtless habit he’d picked up from Deanna, an Armada thing, maybe.

The liquor was good. Q said so, and Guinan poured him another, and then one for herself. “Where’s Q?” she asked. “Or Q? Why is it you, out of all of them?”

El-Aurians, the self-described Listeners, can hear our different names. Guinan hated Q and wasn’t fond of me, either, but the Q she was asking after--I nearly understood what they saw in her. It’s a shame they never could make it work. _Almost respectable,_ she’d said.

Q shrugged. “Family problems, Guinan.”

“Still?”

“Mm.”

“And you’re the problem.”

“One of many,” Q said.

“Of course.”

“It would be dire if I wasn’t,” he smirked. “Cheers.”

They drank. Guinan was watching him with an odd expression, a mix of distaste and the pity you feel for a rabid animal in the sun. She propped her chin on her hand and began to arrange the shattered glass in new patterns, but she didn’t stop looking at him.

“You weren’t listening,” she said at last. “You’re the _problem_ , Q.”

Q blinked irascibly. “The Continuum already kicked me out. What else do you want me to do, die?”

“It would be a start, wouldn’t it?” Guinan flicked a shard of transalum at him, showing a flash of nacre on her wrist. It wasn’t jewelry, Q realized: the ink was set in her skin, and it shone like oil on water.

“Go ahead.” Q sneered. “I can’t get anyone to take me up on the offer.”

There was another glittering flash, the wet crunch of metal on cartilage, and Q _yelped._ Guinan leaned forward, fist tight on the bar knife skewering his hand to the counter. “Don’t wish for that.”

“Ah–— _ow--_ why would you--?” People were starting to stare.

“You deserve it,” Guinan hissed. “As you deserve to die, but the Captain has told me that you won’t. He is my friend, so. I am respecting his wish.”

There it was again, that word, _friend._

“Learn to be grateful.”

“I am. I _am_ \--ow, G, please--”

She tugged the pronged blade out of his hand and Q gasped in pain, eyes blurred with tears. His blood was smeared and pooling all over the counter. “The Continuum is in tatters,” she said quietly, cleaning the knife as though nothing had happened. “I can hear it. Q, what did you do this time?”

“That’s a very personal question,” Q said, and waved to the onlookers with his wounded hand. The universal sign for _nothing to see here, fuck off._

“You owe me from Zima II. Don’t think I forgot, you cad.”

“Of everything you could ask of me, _me,_ the Wandering Sun and Blaze of Creation, you’ll be satisfied with idle gossip?”

“Idol gossip.”

“Oh, do shut up,” Q snapped. “Fine.” He mirrored her posture, moving in so their noses might have touched. Fresh blood bubbled from the hole in his hand. “I’ll tell you something no one else knows. Will that be enough for you, you insatiable parasite?”

“You’ll tell me, and I will decide,” she said evenly.

He’d have to get his hand looked at, he’d have to bail on Deanna. Everything took so much _effort_ when you couldn’t fold time or rearrange matter at the sub-atomic level. It all took so much time.

Guinan waited with the patience of a Zimay saint as Q gathered himself. As I said, El-Aurians? Great listeners.

“Okay.” Q rubbed his brow, forgetting the wound. “Ow, shit. Do I have blood on my face? Well, you heard right. The Continuum is in a bit of a war.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Q is referring to Amanda here.
> 
> The song playing in Ten Forward is Battle Tapes' [Last Resort & Spa](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWCOnJv6MoE)
> 
> I like to think that there would be good days in a Mirror universe, just as there are often unspeakably tragic events happening in the primary timeline. :)


	4. 2364 41153.4

2364, Stardate 41153.4

Proposed Imperial Waystation “Farpoint”

The mystery of Farpoint Station is solved by shooting the Bandi foreman in the head. Deanna recognizes the megasiphonophore for what it is, the _Enterprise_ backs off, and the entire settlement lifts out of its foundation like a flying saucer. It’s a scene straight out of Area 51.

“The alien will survive the ascent through the mesosphere,” Data says, “but we will not.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Lore snarls. Still, he pulls his brother back from the edge of the atrium’s balcony as part of the railing falls away.

If looks could kill, Deanna would’ve murdered Lore, too. Picard makes a mental note not to cross a half-Betazoid in a mood. “Captain, the shuttle bay was destroyed--”

He knows. “Picard to _Enterprise._ Four to beam up.”

Picard’s comm badge crackles with static. “Captain, the transporter--”

“There’s no time, Lieutenant, get us out of here _now!”_

“Yes, sir. Transporter lock in five, four, three…”

The deep amber-red aurora of the transporter flares around them--himself, the Soong twins, and Commander Deanna Riker. Picard allows himself a moment of pride for his team and for his acuity in picking them from the best the Armada had on offer. He has learned, over the years, that pairs are less likely to assassinate their way through the chain of command. So, Will and Deanna. So, Data and Lore.

“…two, one.”

The atoms that make up everything he is disperse, and shudder, and reconvene in a burst of a hundred million microscopic stars. It feels like a full-body sunburn. _Merde,_ Picard thinks. _The transporter._

He hasn’t left the station. The foreman’s body is cooling a few meters away on the scintillating floor, a pool of black blood in stasis around it. He swallows another expletive and touches his comm badge.

“Picard to _Enterprise._ The transport failed. Confirm Riker, Data, and Lore are onboard.”

No response.

A slow clap starts and grows louder, louder behind him and Picard pivots, double-rail phaser drawn, safety off.

Another Armada captain is leaning against the colonnade, spinning his own phaser like an Old Western revolver. He is human, male, dark-haired and wan, maybe a few years younger than Picard. Picard doesn’t recognize him, but then, there are hundreds of ranking captains in the Armada. He could be anyone.

“Congratulations! Johnny's _still got it.”_

“Do I know you?” Picard’s eyes narrow. He hasn’t been called Johnny since Starbase Earhart. Marta had _laughed—_

“I’m impressed, Jean-Luc. But weren’t you supposed to capture the poor devil and make a present of it to Nexus Command?”

Command’s been tracking him, then. He shouldn’t be surprised—they’ve handed him the keys to the flagship and when he speaks, people listen. That’s more dangerous than the railbanks or the torpedoes. He swallows his fury, with difficulty: now is not the time. Picard’s hand is steady, but the pinpoint sight of his phaser still skitters on the other captain’s forehead. “We missed your ship in orbit, Captain…?”

“Oh, I’m not party to this bloody charade. I’m here as a fellow starship captain in name only.” The stranger snaps his fingers, and there is a flash of light.

Picard fires.

The shot goes wide, arcing to hit the atrium ceiling. Picard is alone, and then--

The heat of an embrace.

In place of the man is an animal he’s never seen. It’s a corona of wings, too many wings, and far too many eyes. It’s a perfect promethite sphere. A three-headed serpent. An unidentifiable chimera with a rainbow of scales. A woman, nude, with a mane of auburn hair. A striped and bone-thin hunting dog, bowing down in play. The images flicker, blinding, burning up like old film caught in a projector. It’s a beacon. 

And then it’s a man again, unassuming, so much so he could be _anyone_. Picard takes an inadvertent step back. The heel of his boot sticks in the blood on the floor. Outside the sky is darkening from clear to midnight blue. He feels light-headed with altitude. He feels like laughing.

“It’s easier to speak to you like this, you see,” the stranger says, and he holds out his hand. “Let’s take a walk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’ve made it this far, what do you think? :0 
> 
> I don’t have a beta, so any feedback/concrit is appreciated! I love comments <3


	5. The Garden of Lal

Oh, my God. What a mess. 

_War_ is a word we use because the Continuum is so transcendentally interlinked with all aspects of the universe that any conflict is by nature catastrophic. There’s usually a bit of collateral, mortals die, but you are always dying! Put to scale, this was nothing more than a spat over the pattern of a weave. A period of self-reflection, or an artistic reckoning, if you will. It always is.

  
  


#

  
  


2368, Stardate 45999.0

The Sigma Quadrant

  
  


Q staggered into the turbolift, holding his injured hand to his chest. Guinan had so thoughtfully given him a cocktail napkin to staunch the bleeding, but it was already soaked through. 

And, his brain was about to boil in its own cerebrospinal fluid. He was buzzed and embarrassed, as if he had any farther to fall: every time, _every time_ he was blindsided by the fact that Picard would associate with an El-Aurian like her--that he would let her serve drinks, honestly!--but it had been _Get off my ship, Q!_ from day one. What a hypocrite.

The turbolift wasn’t moving. “Medbay,” Q said, out loud this time. “No, hang on. Computer, where’s Commander Data?”

“Commander Data is in his quarters,” the ship’s computer replied. Q pulled a face. Nothing was quite so humbling as having to rely on a stupid machine.

“Let’s go there.” He leaned against the closed door, dripping blood on the metal grate that was the floor. Someone had torn up the carpet, years ago by the look of it. Probably because people kept bleeding on it.

Q sighed.

Data’s quarters were, in every way, the opposite of Q’s own. Where Q’s space was chaotically filthy, Data had collected a lifetime’s worth of precious memories and each one had its place. The room could have just as easily been an art gallery, bathed in warm reading light with a view over the ship’s bow.

The android beckoned him in. “You are injured,” he observed, and it was such a relief not to be interrogated, Q could’ve hugged him. 

“Yeah, I didn’t want to… it didn’t seem like… well, I don’t know, it’s not serious, right?” Q said bracingly. 

Data took Q’s palm, examining the wound. Guinan’s knife had pierced cleanly between the metacarpals and, if you looked, you could see the floor on the other side. Q regretted looking, and closed his eyes. “Your pain tolerance has improved,” Data said. “This is not an insignificant injury.”

“Oh. It isn’t?” Q felt faint.

“I recommend consulting Dr. Howard. It is possible you have damaged a tendon or neurovascular bundle. There is quite a lot of blood.” 

“That’s okay, Data, I feel fine,” Q lied. “It’s not my dominant hand.”

“I am aware.” Data’s eyes flickered. “You may require surgery.”

“Can’t we just put some tape on it and call it a night?”

Data stared at Q, unblinking. “Dr. Howard is not on duty at this hour. If you wished to avoid her, now would be—”

“ _Please,_ Data. Don’t make me beg.”

The android arched an eyebrow. “I will see what I can do.”

Q settled in an accent chair and found himself directly in the line of sight of a Cycladic sculpture, mounted with wire on the wall next to a painted portrait of a teenaged girl by the ocean. The marble figure’s blank face was strikingly Soongesque, as was the girl’s. “Where do you find this stuff, Data?”

“The sculpture was a gift from a professor at the Armada Academy, for the occasion of my first apartment,” Data knelt, businesslike, at Q’s feet. “Your hand?”

Q proffered it to him, wincing as he, Data, flushed the wound with water and disinfectant, careful not to rip away any of the newly jellied scab. Data wordlessly applied a bandage of self-sealing second skin and doubled it up with gauze. Then, as a finishing touch, he stuck Q with an analgesic hypo, just below the soft inside of his elbow.

“How does that feel?”

Q flexed his fingers experimentally, as much as he could with the bandage. “Pretty bad,” he said. “But it was worse before.”

“It will suffice as a temporary measure. It remains imperative that you see Dr. Howard, or another member of the medical staff, as soon as you can.”

“Sure,” Q said, in a tone that suggested he absolutely would do no such thing. A brush of orange caught his eye. “Spot!”

“Ignore her,” Data urged. “It is counterintuitive, but she will be more amenable to affection if she is allowed to approach you on her own terms.”

“Is that right?” Q slid out of the chair to join the android on the floor, crossing his legs. “Tell me, then. Your brother said _you_ said something interesting about me. Said he couldn’t shake it, nor can I, and I find I’m in the mood to hear about myself.”

Data was quiet, accessing, as Spot bonked her head up against his knee. The little domesticated predator made a noise like a shuttlecraft. He picked her up all at once and she sank into his arms, paws in the air at odd angles, purring loudly. “Ah. He must have been referring to my observation that the punishment the Continuum has wrought upon you would be advantageous to me, were I to earn it.”

“Come again?”

“I endeavor to be as ‘human’ as I can be within my operational parameters. You have achieved in disgrace what I have always aspired to be.” Data folded Spot’s ears inside out. “It is an irony. Perhaps I should proposition intercourse with the Captain.”

Not for the last time, Q found himself at a total loss with the android. He reached out to pet Spot, who hissed. No help at all.

“A joke,” Data assured him. “Was it amusing?”

  
  


#

  
  


By the next afternoon, Q’s hand had gone necrotic. Debridement and surgery took forty-three minutes, and the experience put the proverbial fear of God (Dr. Howard) in him.

  
  


#

  
  


I want to say that Q became human after that. It didn’t happen that way: he was a creature with an IQ of 2005, with dull, distracted eyes, with graying hair, with an illness of alcoholism and a thanatophobia that left him paradoxically happy to be alive. He was a chimera of loss with a dash of human nucleic acid in the mix. He was incorrigible.

Q--acerbic, changeable, capricious Q--had friends. He had affairs, too, which were never intended to last and so never did. Time was suddenly a finite resource, and sex became repetitive, and acquaintances drifted away. He could pick his battles and with the experience of context he was sometimes able to be useful, but more often than not he was a spanner in the works.

He did his best never to be alone in a room with Picard. 

His best was pretty good, but not good enough.

_A year passed._

And, after a year, he still hated to sleep, he never got used to sleeping. The terror of dreams, of losing time, of waking up and not knowing where or when he was, took hold and never let go. He would pass out drunk, or from sheer exhaustion, but most nights he’d walk. 

Not that there was anywhere to go. The ISS _Enterprise-_ 6, for all her somber beauty, was just not that interesting unless you were a starship engineer, and Q wasn’t. She was built utilitarian. Every deck looked the same, except Deck 6, which had been shot out by a warbird in 2367 and was held together by a patchwork of glittering force fields. Circling the concentric corridors endlessly was meditative in a certain way, but there was a limit.

This is what drove Q to the holodeck, after doth protesting so much. 

It happened like this: 

Q ran into First Officer Ro as she was leaving Hologrid III at 0224. He was talking to an audio recorder about tesseracts and had taken a tab of something someone had assured him was ‘good,’ her hair was slicked back and she had bite marks from her lip to her shoulder.

They did not quite crash into each other--they sidestepped the same way once, and then again, until Q was stuck with his back to the wall and she wheeled on him. “Lieutenant,” she had a gift for reducing rank to an insult, “fuck off.”

“Okay, Number Two.” Q grimaced. A tang of agarwood followed her, familiar. “What program were you running? The Cardassian sauna? Self-loathing is one thing, all well and good, but--”

And there it was, a stun knife at his throat. Q swallowed hard. He had scars from this already, a flecking of pearly cuts above his collarbone: being mortally threatened was so commonplace on the _Enterprise_ , it scarcely counted as thrill-seeking behavior. “What will you do with that, Laren?” 

The Bajoran’s forehead came just to his shoulder, even in boots, but she’d also suplexed Q before. Multiple times, even.

“I’ll leave that up to you,” she said. “Tell anyone I was here and I’ll fillet you like a Cardassian vole, got it?”

“At the holodeck?” Q looked back at the door to Hologrid III, incredulous. “ _Commander,_ perversities aside, we’re all adults here--”

“Fillet,” Ro repeated. 

“Fine. Whatever,” Q held up his hands, making a show of stopping the audio recorder. “I really couldn’t care less.”

Naturally, then, the first thing Q did once she was gone was check out Hologrid III. 

The arch was unlocked and Ro’s program was still running. A wave of hot, humid air rolled over him as he stepped inside and Q blinked instantaneous sweat from his eyes. It was not the blue-tiled warren of baths he’d expected but a misty conservatory with a rainforest’s worth of winged life among the foliage above, birds and flying foxes and glassy Betazed beetles. It was remarkably quiet: the drone of the ship’s systems was dampened by soundproof foam and all Q could hear was the rustle of leaves and the occasional chaffinch. 

There were paths amidst the underbrush and Q chose one at random. Any lingering thoughts about tesseracts or Commander Ro dissipated as he worked his way deeper into the hologram, sweating through the back of his shirt and getting illusory pollen on his fingers. The plants were more black and burgundy and red than green, and mist obscured any repetitions in the pattern. 

In the fifteen months since his abrupt confluence with the Armada, Q had not set foot on a planet, nor Starbase, nor asteroid--a new biome, however false, was novel. He kept walking. 

He snapped his fingers, just in case, but nothing happened.

“It’s not that easy.” 

Q should’ve known there’d be someone else lurking in the shitty sex den. Lore was leaning nonchalantly against the canyoned trunk of a tree, all in black, watching him. His eyes shone in the evening gloom. 

Q clapped his hands together, trying to dislodge the strange disappointment coiling in his stomach. “You and Ro, wow. I gotta admit, I did not have a horse in that race, I did not see it coming--real impressive spitfire of a woman, isn’t she? Puny, though.”

Lore didn’t even blink. “What are you doing here?”

“The arch was open,” Q shrugged. “What’s she like? I had her down as the man but you never know, sometimes they’re just waiting to be shown who’s--”

“It’s only a little fun, Q. She’s got someone else, flesh and blood. Doesn’t talk about him much.” Lore cocked his head with a self-deprecating smile. “Some girls just don’t go for synthetics.”

“Well, there’s a lot to be said for the real thing.” Q picked a flower from a strangling vine, and it disappeared a moment later. “Don’t you think?”

“I think of it as a matter of preference. And perspective.”

“Is it Jean-Luc?”

“Not everyone shares your preferences.”

“Ouch. I really felt that.” Q picked another flower and several leaves and let them fall, watching them vanish before they hit the ground. “What _is_ this program? It’s not Bajor, and it’s not a Vulcan oasis, and it’s certainly not that backwater you’re from.”

“Omicron Theta.”

“So, what is it?” 

“No secret,” Lore replied. “Our daughter programmed it.”

“Your what?” There were a handful of kids on the _Enterprise--_ given seven, eight, nine years in open space, people get lonely--but none of them were androids. For an insane second Q wondered what _fully functional_ really entailed.

“Data never told you about Lal? He’s so--” The android looked close to genuinely hurt. “It’s not like she’s _dead_. She’s fine.”

“You and Data…?”

“Come on,” Lore took Q’s arm in an iron grip, pulling him off the path, deeper into the garden. “You should meet her now. Load Program Soong One Lambda.” 

It was only a few steps through pitch-dark ground cover before everything opened up into a clearing and Q found stone under his boots instead of mud. The center of the garden was a courtyard paved with red jasper marble, inset with a rectangular pool. Spilling over into the water was a knotted rat-king of a mangrove tree, and beneath it, on a bench, sat a teenaged girl Q had seen before.

She was staring at the water with a fixed expression, perfectly still. Her eyes were Soong yellow and she had the same round face, though her hair was styled in a bob and she was wearing a knit poncho over her civilian jumpsuit. She was barefoot.

“Lal?” Lore’s voice was soft, almost tentative, but it broke her out of her reverie like phaser fire.

“Dad!” She jumped up, running straight across the surface of the water to tackle Lore in a hug. “Back so _Soong_? And you must be Q,” she held out her hand, grinning. “I know all about you.” 

She withdrew before Q could shake her hand and tried snapping her fingers. The first few tries she fumbled, and then with a flash and a snap the courtyard kaleidoscoped around them into a zigzag cataract of stairways, rising all the way to an oculus above. They were at the bottom of a massive stepwell. “Like that, right? This is kind of like my own Continuum. Do you like it?”

“I…” Q looked to Lore, bemused. “What is she?”

“My brother and I built Lal years ago as a third Soong-type android. The project was a wash.”

“Why?”

Lore grimaced. “She suffered a cascade failure in her neural net shortly after activation and her hardware was unsalvageable. I transferred her memories and core programming to the ship’s computer, and… here we are.”

“I’m a fancy hologirl,” Lal said lightly. 

“You’re more than that. She’s more than that,” Lore insisted, the quintessential proud father. “Lal is the _Enterprise._ ”

Lal _shh_ -ed him, but she was practically glowing with praise. “I have Zulu One access, so I’m super king of the hill. Or, I know as much as the computer does, anyway. I told you--my Continuum. Can you tell me more about it, Q? There isn’t any way to calibrate the long-range scanners for Q entities, so I’m kind of at an impasse.”

“Picard knows his ship is in the hands of a teenager?”

“Well--”

“I’m three years old,” Lal chimed in. “Of course he knows. Captain Picard is my godfather--he totally loves us. Me and _Enterprise,_ I mean _._ Do you think we can talk about the scanners? Commander LaForge had a really cool idea about extradimensional puddlejumping, but he and dad are hung up on wormholes. I feel like, if we were able to locate the actual Continuum--”

“Lore, you dirty dog,” Q hooked an arm around Lore’s shoulders, and then Lal’s, drawing them into an awful group huddle. The girl was the same height as her twin parents but gangly, a bit awkward, all elbows and legs. “You were hiding her from me.”

A matter of perspective, indeed. Q had been wasting irreplaceable time while the key to his redemption waited in a few lines of code, in fiction, by the water at the bottom of a well. You can’t make this stuff up.

“I thought you hated the holodeck,” Lore said archly, sounding more than a little pleased.

“No way. Who said that? We’re going to have _fun._ ” 

  
  


#

  
  


“You want to do _what_ with Captain Picard?”

  
  


#

  
  


“Computer, locate Captain Picard?”

“Captain Picard is in his quarters.”

Q was standing outside said Captain’s quarters later that morning, sore and hyperactive from lack of sleep. He listened, but he couldn’t hear anything of Lal in the computer. It spoke with the same neutrally female vocaloid it had always used.

“Lal, locate Captain Picard?”

“Captain Picard is in his quarters. It’s still me, dummy.”

The door was shut. Not so long ago Q would’ve materialized on the other side with a thought, which was easy, and more importantly didn’t give him any time to second guess whether or not it was a wise thing to do. Just thinking about ringing the comm panel was more than he was prepared for at 0700.

“Can you open the door?” Q asked, resigned.

“Super negative on that, Q-ontrol. I mean, if it was an emergency, duh, all yours, but your libido ain’t an emergency, is it? You didn’t catch sex pollen somewhere? You are _so_ lucky you’re not Vulcan.”

“Noted,” he said, glaring at a passing Vulcan ensign who had the nerve to do a double-take. Q’s hand hovered over the comm panel. He inhaled for a count of four and caught himself: talking to a three-year-old teen trapped in a holodeck all night was the real mistake here, clearly. She was almost as bad as Deanna.

“Lal, this is stupid.”

“Nooo, it’s not! Just tell him about how bad you want him to fu--”

Q pressed the ‘Call’ button on the comm panel.

“Come!”

The Captain’s quarters were a contusion of wenge and taupe carpet and _marron_ , cut up into a half-open plan and several degrees cooler than the corridor. A record was playing--Erik Satie--and the blackout shutters were drawn back on the void beyond. Picard, for his part, was on the sofa with a paper book, espresso in hand.

He glanced up. “Q, what are you doing here?”

Q picked an apple out of the remains of breakfast. “Do I need a reason, _mon capitaine_ ?” He bit into it with more aplomb than necessary, pacing around the living area. It was not very lived-in: Picard’s sense of decor was stark and impersonal. There was a painting by Data, and then a few artifacts on the shelves, none of which Q could remember the exact province of. Altamid? Gideon? “I wanted to say hello. We never _talk_ anymore, you know, it’s breaking my heart.”

“You were at the ops meeting two days ago. You got in a fight with Ro over the freight cost of quadrotriticale.”

“That was more of a tiff, I’d say. The woman’s never seen a tribble.” Another self-satisfied crunch of the apple. “I’m wasted on logistics.”

“Sit down, Q,” Picard snapped. 

Q sat. 

“I met Lal Soong,” he said, after a long stretch where he waited for Picard to say something and Picard said nothing. “Smart girl. Thinks the world of you, of course. You realize I’d never tried the holodeck before today?”

“Is that so?” Picard raised a scarred eyebrow. “That’s surprising.”

“Why?”

“You had such a penchant for theater, Q.”

Q swallowed the last of his apple core, considering that statement. “The Continuum can’t get enough of a good parable,” he said at last, and got up again, unable to be still. “We--they--like to play with patterns. You know what they say about history.”

“It repeats itself.”

“It’s not just _repetition,_ ” Q corrected him, wandering to the replicator. “Triple-shot caramel-swirl latte, iced, whipped cream, 125% sugar, straw. The greatest storytellers understand it’s all about poetry. We’d be lost without rhyme or reason to make sense of the universe, and it’s easier to communicate within a common frame of reference when one’s kind has outlasted language. Otherwise it’s pure nonsense. You will recall the Tamarians.”

“You must really hate it here,” Picard said. A straightforward observation--there was no accusation in his voice, no sympathy. 

“It could be worse. The last time the Continuum kicked me out, the Calamarain nearly killed me. And everyone else.”

“Yes, you’ve mentioned that. It seems you’re rather an oddity of the Continuum.”

“They don’t understand me,” Q said, collecting his triple-shot caramel-swirl latte from the replicator and taking a sip. He cast a baleful look at the replicator. “I don’t think this is 125%. It’s strange. I kept expecting the Calamarain to turn up, but no one’s come for me, Picard. It’s like I don’t exist.” He examined the fading pink scar on his palm. “Well, almost.”

Picard set down his book, deep in thought. “The Calamarain were wiped out before the Revolution.”

“How is that possible?” Q asked, hoping he didn’t sound too concerned. He perched on the back of the sofa and then swung his legs over to sit next to the Captain. Picard’s eyes flashed with annoyance, but he didn’t move away. Out of pique, probably. He was always so stubborn.

“The Vulcan Science Academy, in partnership with the Armada, developed a weapon they called _yon-kur tukh_. Red matter. It was a reactive, unstable plasma that could be ignited to cause a singularity.”

“A black hole device? And you used _that_ on the Calamarain?”

“Not me personally. Red matter was intended for… it was not designed… it was supposed to be a safeguard against spatial anomalies. It was dismantled and destroyed following a series of temporal accidents in the old Neutral Zone.”

“Would be nice to make your problems disappear, is that it?”

“Yes.” Picard’s expression was unreadable. 

“Pity you can’t get rid of me that easily,” Q said. Their shoulders were pressed together, he could smell the tell-tale blank of a sonic shower clinging to Picard’s skin. “What about the Shedai, or the Komar?”

“Extinct.”

“Ω?”

“I haven’t heard of--”

“Well, that’s a relief.” 

Picard turned to him. “Perhaps the Continuum is protecting you, in their way.” 

We absolutely were not.

“No. They wouldn’t.”

“Or, maybe, you’re just not that important.” Now, where had Q heard that before? Picard worked a hand into Q’s hair and found a hold on the back of his neck, forcing him into eye contact, studying him. Q blushed. He couldn’t focus, Picard’s face kept blurring into a shadowy smear. He was so tired, but Picard was _touching_ him. “There’s a certain freedom in obsolescence, isn’t there?”

“Who exactly are you talking about, Picard?” Q’s eyes narrowed and he leaned in closer, angling his head to avoid Picard’s nose. “You must _loathe_ it out here.”

“ _Au contraire,_ ” Picard murmured. 

“You’re as much an exile as I am.”

“This ship is a faction of the Revolution unto herself. I believe in our mission.”

“And what mission is that?”

Picard smiled faintly. “Whatever I deem necessary, Q.”

This was the part where Q would have preferred to vanish. He was quickly realizing that he lacked the experience to remove himself from this situation in a conventional, three-dimensional way with his pride and abdominal wall intact--not that he thought Picard would gut him, per se, but the acid feeling of shame in his blood was comparable to mortal injury. 

He wasn’t usually sober for conversations like this.

Picard inhaled deeply through his nose and Q shuddered, bracing himself for--something, he wasn’t sure what. He wanted it, that much was certain, but he still couldn’t stop glancing towards the door. 

“Are you afraid?”

Q couldn’t answer. 

“Is this another game? Q, look at me,” he tugged Q’s head so Q was forced again to stare up at him, twisted uncomfortably around. And then Picard’s grip softened, and his hand drew to the sharp angle of Q’s jaw, light and warm, and this was so, so much worse. Arousal shot through Q like heat lightning. “I understand you less as a man than I did at the zenith of your power.”

“That makes two of us,” Q said with a lot more confidence than he felt. 

His erection was straining against the fabric of his uniform, plain in the reading light--Q had slept with enough men to know he was above average in this respect and he couldn’t imagine why he’d chosen this body, not when it was so quick to betray him. Petty vanity? Insane.

Picard saw it, he wasn't blind. His eyes were silver as they traced the outline of Q’s cock, his thighs, the hollowed protrusion of his knee. He drew back, and Q moved to follow him instinctively.

He wanted to sleep. His brain was conflating _sleep_ with _sleep with Picard_ but that didn’t matter, not really--he wanted to sink into the sofa with the heat of Picard’s body under him and kiss, and taste Picard’s mouth and feel Picard’s tongue in _his_ mouth, and he wanted to close his eyes and not have to open them ever again. They would exist in darkness, out of time. A shiver ran through Q’s ribs through to his groin.

And then Picard slotted his shin into the groove of Q’s hip and would not let him any closer. Q pushed, testing.

And then there was a _crash_ and he was on the floor, and the tread of the Captain’s boot was cutting into his shoulder. 

“What do you want, Q?”

All Q had to do was ask. _I want to suck your cock. I want to take you in my mouth and taste you and I want you to fuck me until I can’t breathe. I want to choke on you. I want you to do whatever you_

_(I want to die)_

Can you imagine what it’s like, having to ask for what you want when for billions of years every passing desire changed reality around you and it fit perfectly each time? He was still Q. Even in a nano-universe of carbon and commensal organisms, with precum leaking through his trousers, he was not about to fucking beg for it.

_We weren’t even friends._

Q raised his chin. “Is this how you are with all the girls? I’ve gotta say, the whole _Pathologically Dominant Captain_ act is pretty cliché--not what anyone wants to hear about a performance, but if I don’t tell you, who will?” 

Q imagined that Picard might break his nose, or that he might break his nose _and_ show him exactly how to shut the hell up, preferably in a manner that involved oral sex. Picard did not touch him: he stood, picking up his comm badge from the coffee table.

“Picard to Bridge. I will be reporting eleven minutes early.”

“Yes, sir.”

Q watched, trapped, as Picard fastened the comm badge to his uniform and made to leave. The Captain stopped at the door. His back was to Q, a cut-out silhouette, one hand on the frame. “You can see yourself out,” he said. “You’re not on Alpha Shift, so--try and get some damn rest.”

  
  


#

  
  


Q had nothing to do with the disappearance of the Calamarain, not personally, and because of their intrinsic transplanar nature, it was impossible that the Empire had inverse-nuked them out of time. They had, in fact, become embroiled slightly in the Continuum war. If a human is to a Q as a microbe is to a human, then a Q is to a Calamarain as a human is to a dog. We like them, generally.

However, it follows that if the Imperial Nexus Command hadn’t at least attempted to annihilate the species, then Q would have died in a shuttlecraft in 2368.

Or we would’ve stopped them. Either way, things would be different.

  
  


#

  
  


2369, Stardate 46857.2

Free State Moon “New Providence”

  
  


“New Providence?”

“We got a distress call,” Lal said. She was on her back in the dry grass, with her poncho rolled up under her head as a pillow. “Ensign Ulrich rerouted us five hours and thirty-three minutes ago.” She sat up, and the equations hanging in the air around her--she’d been doodling--scattered like so many seeds in the wind. “Weird.”

“So you know everything that goes on with the ship,” Q peered up at her. “Why aren’t you stationed on the bridge?”

“Can’t. I’d need a holo-emitter.”

“That sounds easy enough to wrangle.”

“It freaks the crew way out. You probably know this, but if we were programmed for maximum dick-assery, my dads and I could hijack _Enterprise_ in a hot second.”

“Language,” Q said, without any real commitment. Data had told him, once, how the Armada had found Lore and himself in pieces in the dust of Omicron Theta. They’d been requisitioned and assigned to the flagship as two sides of the same coin by Picard’s order when it would have made sense, by all rights, to keep them at Daystrom forever for AI research. The Soongs owed Picard a blood debt. 

“Commander Ro wants me shut down.”

“Oh yeah?”

“She’s reeeal loyal to Captain Picard, if you catch my drift.”

“That’s Number Two for you,” Q sighed. The sky in Hologrid III was clear blue today, with no sun in sight. A breeze rippled over the prairie sea in waves, streaks of silver flowing across gold like foam. It was--as always--an invented place of Lal’s choosing, a world that she delighted in folding and refolding like origami. He and Lal had been luckless so far in their hunt for a trace of the Continuum, but switching focus from the long-range scanners to the more malleable--and totally dysfunctional--transporter array felt like a turn in the right direction. 

“You’re jealous,” Lal announced. “Why aren’t _you_ on the bridge, Don Q-uixote?”

“It freaks the crew way out,” Q sighed again, closing his eyes.

“Oh, I get it. They don’t like you,” she said, and Q choked down a pained laugh. “No contact from the New Providence settlement since the initial distress call. No life signs. They’re taking a shuttle down.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” 

“Um--dad, Lieutenants C’narr and Sifin, and Ensign Krow.”

Now Q sat up, crossing one leg over the other. “Can you stream a visual when they land?”

“Why?” 

“I’m curious. Something about this… I’m getting déjà vu.”

“ _Enterprise_ gets a lot of distress calls, and responds to seventy one point one percent of them,” Lal informed him, drawing up her notes again. 

“I was wondering about that, actually. Isn’t it out of tune for the ex-flagship of the Imperial Armada to zip around the galaxy _helping_ people? Don’t we have a horrifying reputation to uphold? Children to terrorize, et cetera?”

“That depends on who you ask. My dad--Commander Lore, I mean--can’t stand this shit, but the broad consensus is that the more planets owe you a favor, the better.”

“Huh. Yeah, that makes sense.” Q chewed his lip. “Data enjoys it, then.”

“Yep.”

“Although... Lore seems to be the less illustriously absent of your fathers, in spite of being the ship’s worst cunt. What’s that about?”

“Why don’t you not ask a one-of-a-kind AI difficult questions? You might send me into a cascade failure death spiral, and _then_ where would we be?” Lal’s tone was frenetically sarcastic, and he took the hint. Weeks with her had given him a reasonable sense of caution: in certain ways, she was more like Lore than Data. Maybe he’d just answered his own question.

“Dead in the water,” Q admitted. “On a rescue mission.”

“Cha-ching.” 

Q thought it best to let her cool off.

“Has the Continuum ever interfered with humanity before this?” she asked, after a few minutes of embarrassing silence. 

“This?”

“You and Picard.”

“Obviously. But I wouldn’t call this _interference._ ”

“Torture?”

“Liminality.”

“You mean limerence?” Lal stuck out her tongue.

Q flicked a tuft of grass at her. “No, I meant liminality.”

She smirked and shook her head. “Can you make a list of every instance of the Continuum’s, uh, _intersection_ with Terran or Vulcan history, then? If we cross-reference your memory with the Armada’s database, maybe we can find a pattern. Like a signature, or… something.”

“Have you talked to Guinan?” Q frowned, hating himself for the suggestion. He and Guinan hadn’t spoken since the night she’d stabbed him, although sometimes they drank together. It was unavoidable, what with her being the bartender and Q being an addict.

“The El-Aurian? No, she doesn’t come here. I don’t think the holodeck works for El-Aurians. It would look all out-of-phase. Total epilepsy trigger. Why?”

He folded his arms behind his head. “Apparently El-Aurians can hear past what you call the cosmic radiation background. She might have some idea of where to start with the transporter array… although I’ll warn you, she’s more of a con artist than an engineer.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so before?! That’s amazing! That’s--” Whatever else it was, he never found out. An odd expression clouded her face, and Lal seized up, staring through the perfect sky at something unseen and far away. “Q, you should take a look at this.”

  
  


#

  
  


Q ran. He was not prone to running, and he loathed every second of the basic training regimen Ro’s bootlickers put him through each quarter, but he careened into the first turbolift he saw at a speed that would’ve surprised him if he’d had the presence of mind to notice. 

“Bridge.” 

“Input authorization code. Bridge access is restricted to approved personnel only. Clearance level: India Two.”

“ _Lal--_ ”

“Okay, okay, give me a sec, I’ll override.”

Q exhaled slowly, letting the back of his head knock against the turbolift’s paneling as he struggled to catch his breath. How to explain this to Picard and his troop of yes-men? They would have to call the shuttle back, and then what? 

_How do you expect to manage anything as a Lieutenant in Picard’s Armada?_

“Try it now.”

“Bridge?”

The turbolift lurched and Q gave a short nod to the security camera nestled in the corner. “Thanks.”

Call the shuttle back--and wait, it would take at least ten or twelve minutes to return from the surface--and then what? All Q could think of was spiriting the _Enterprise_ away to the edge of the universe, somewhere safe, somewhere they could regroup and repair Deck 6, and the starboard quarter cloak, and the transporter array. Without the Continuum this was, of course, impossible, and yet he kept zeroing in on it like a hound digging at a fox in a hole. 

“We need to fix the transporter.”

“Yeah, but--”

It was a starting point, at least.

Q had not set foot on the bridge since he’d been left naked for Gamma Shift, and it hadn’t much changed since. Same shitty carpet, same mood lighting, same superficial crack in the viewscreen that now commanded Alpha Shift’s attention. A video feed from the shuttle’s dashcam was displayed in full 24K, the mirror image of the scene Lal had patched into the holodeck. 

The moonscape was sublime. Low hills mottled with thorn-scrub rolled under a dark sky shot through with a neon sunset. Data was with a slim, brindled Caitian, scanning a strip of cable with a tricorder. The others were patrolling a perimeter farther away, rifles cocked and charged. Their pace was halting, uneven, and it was no guess as to why. The ground beneath their feet had melted to obsidian slag. Ridges of black glass shone in the sunset, radiating from a lividly open pit in a pattern like a child’s drawing of a sun.

There were no buildings, no roads, nothing to suggest there had been an outpost except the ugly absence of one.

“We’re sure these are the coordinates?” Ro was gripping the back of her chair as though she might fall over. 

“Yes, Commander, this is what we extrapolated from the original distress call. I’ve run it through Nebra and cartography twice,” the helmsman craned his neck to face her. “It’s downtown New Providence.”

“Mother _fucker_ ,” Ro groaned. “If you’re wrong--”

“We’re in the right place,” Q cut in. Eight faces turned to him, expressions ranging the spectrum from alarm to resentment, and he was suddenly excruciatingly aware that he was in sock feet, and that he was wearing a civilian tunic. Stylish, certainly, but not to code. 

“That,” he gestured to the pit, “is all that’s left of them.”

“You’re not permitted--”

“You don’t have bridge clearance!”

“Q, what is the meaning of this?”

“What was the population of the outpost, Ensign?”

“Oh, who _cares?”_ Q had to raise his voice over the din, half-jogging down the ramp to the center of the room. The split level design was inspired, really. “Ensign, call the shuttle back, _now_ , before you live to regret it.”

“Belay that order, he’s not--”

Q rolled his eyes. Thirty seconds on the bridge and his temper was frayed down to the live wire. “Okay. You’re all so fucking narrow-minded, it’s hopeless--”

“Fourteen thousand six hundred and fifty.”

“--but, if you ask nicely, I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret.”

“Did you come here just to wreak havoc, Q, or do you have something you’d like to contribute?” This was Picard.

“To cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war, Jean-Luc. You set that up very well.” 

“Just let me kill him, Captain.” Ro clicked the safety off her phaser. 

“Go for it, I dare you.”

“ _Enough_ , both of you,” Picard held up a hand. The sun on the viewscreen was gone below the horizon and it cast the bridge in a haze of lilac and indigo. “Q, report.”

Q stared at him. The captain was straight-backed in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, with Ro at his shoulder like the owl of Athena. There was no trick to this, no humor in his voice. There was no sign he remembered the dismal morning in his quarters, either, but now was definitely not the time.

“Call the shuttle back,” Q repeated. “And set a course for--how fast can this piece of shit go?”

“Warp nine point nine, sir,” the helmsman answered automatically.

“Actually, the injector coils are out of alignment, so--”

“Warp five point nine max. Sorry sir.”

“Fine, fine. Lay in a course for Andromeda and let’s go.”

“The Andromeda _galaxy?_ That’s a hundred years-- _”_

“Yes! The galaxy!” Q spun around, feeling as though he might tear out his hair. No wonder Picard was bald. 

“Belay that again, Ensign,” Picard rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Q, before I take Commander Ro up on her offer--”

“Do you want to be around when the Borg get here, _Captain?”_ Q sat down in Ro’s chair, luxuriating for a moment before turning to Picard. “Or d’you think we can take them on while we limp through the stars on warp _five point nine_?”

And just like that it was as if they were the only two men on the bridge. They stared at each other, unblinking, tensed to spring in the silence, fear pooling in their lungs like water. Picard’s eyes flicked from Q’s ashen face to the sweat on his neck to his stupid socks, and then they closed. 

Ro holstered her phaser. 

“ _Enterprise_ to Data. Q has informed us that the Borg are responsible for the destruction and assimilation of the New Providence outpost. Return to the ship.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Funny story: my computer totally bit the dust last weekend and this chapter was nearly lost forever (now I write in gdocs...)
> 
> Back up your shit!!!! <3


	6. Nadir

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> or, _The Best of Both Worlds_ MIRRORVERSE BREAKCORE MIX
> 
> I’m obsessed with the Wolf 359 episodes (seriously, I think angsty Q/Locutus was the first TNG fan art I took a stab at 10+ years ago) and PIC honing in on Picard’s Borg PTSD was the greatest gift I’ve ever received.

2369, Stardate 46857.3

Free State Moon “New Providence”

  
  


Picard practically dragged him to the ready room. The Captain pulled Q inside collar-first and dropped the taller man to the rug, locking the door behind them. 

Thirteen minutes until the shuttle met them at the RV point.

“What the hell, Picard?!” Q scrambled to his knees, wishing he’d put on boots before running out of the holodeck like fucking Paul Revere. There was a hole in the heel of his sock.

“You planned this,” Picard’s voice was murderously low. “Q, I have put up with your arrogance, your fits of mania and your vanity but this is the end of it. You have doomed this ship. Us. Everyone.” 

It was never quiet on the _Enterprise,_ there was only endless, deafening white noise. Pure fury bored through Q’s stomach and wound its way up his spine to his mouth and it sharpened his teeth, and he laughed through his nose, and he smiled. “How dare you?” 

“What?”

“I said--” Q got to his feet, favoring his right knee--bad since day one--“ _how_ _dare you_?”

If he’d had his powers, he would have broken the _Enterprise_ carefully and deliberately into each of her component parts and left her adrift. He would have taken Picard and shown him the futures where he, Q, did not care to give him--four years ago, now--a metaphorical bloody nose, with only eighteen dead and the foreknowledge of the Borg to show for it. He would have shown him what the Sol System looked like after the Borg came through. He would have shown him how he _really_ felt.

If he had his powers.

As it was, Q just swung at him. Picard blocked the blow easily, but Q had the advantages of height and weight and he lunged, bringing them both down to the floor again with a crash. Quarterly combat training hadn’t beaten much into Q but he got Picard where he wanted him anyway, on his back and pinned with Q’s knee on his sternum and his nails digging into Q’s arm. Something fell from Picard’s desk and broke. 

_“_ I would never fucking plan this, your death, my death, any of it. _You don’t know what I want._ All I ever wanted-- _”_ Q’s voice cracked. He was out of line, totally hysterical. He didn’t care. It was so easy to abandon all decorum and none of Q’s punches had landed, but Picard hadn’t hit him back, either. It was so easy. “ _Why_ would I put myself through this much _humiliation_ just to _die_ at the hands of the fucking _Borg?!”_

Picard looked up at him, gray eyes quizzical, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “I assumed you rather liked it,” he said. 

“ _Fuck you,_ ” Q laughed again, hollowly. “If I had any semblance of my powers you would at least want to fuck me.”

Did he say that out loud?

“Q, you exceed your own standards of self-preoccupation!” Picard snarled. “Tell me, then, if your _introduction_ wasn’t an intentional trap, what was it?”

Q rolled off him with a grunt, leaning against the lacquer desk. “You were never supposed to know.”

“I’m sure. Are you going to explain yourself, or do I have to make it an order?” Picard got up gingerly, on his guard, as though Q might attack him again. He did not move away. Q refused to look up at him.

“The Continuum’s not supposed to interfere with…” Q gestured vaguely. “There’s no reason why not, we just--it’s not what we do. Not like this. It’s all very beneath us.”

“Q, what did you _do?”_

“It was a warning, alright?” Q pushed his hands through his salt-and-peppered hair. “You weren’t prepared. You weren’t _ready_. I told you.”

“A warning,” Picard repeated. “You mean to say that you, Q of the Continuum, descended from on high because--you decided the _Terran Empire_ needed saving?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The Empire is a lost cause. But you--” Q huffed. This was disastrous. “You’re someone who ought to survive, Picard.”

“This fascination with me is starting to seem obsessive, Q.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t get the wrong idea. You’re _not that important_ to the continuity of the universe. If not you, they’d just come for someone else.” What Q didn’t say was that when the Borg first crossed paths with ships like the _Calistoga_ or the _Anaheim_ , the corresponding Sol System society was assimilated within the decade.

Picard went very still, hand hovering over his comm badge.

“Q, what is it you’re trying to tell me?”

It was inevitable, of course. This had always been preordained, not through fate but by the infinite minor conflagrations of crazy random happenstance--and acts of Q--that keep the galaxy spinning. He’d only thought they had more time.

Q’s billions of years of existence, abstracted and scattershot by his waterlogged brain, were more than he could bear. He felt impossibly ancient, impossibly alone, and yet here was Picard looking down at him like the human he was. 

_How will you do anything as a Lieutenant in Picard’s Armada?_

“You’d better sit down, Picard. This one’s a doozy.”

  
  


#

  
  


Realigning the injector coils for maximum warp took thirty-six hours in the shelter of the Paulson Nebula, an amethyst eyesore not far from the New Providence outpost.

It was thirty-six hours of red alert, of Q in Engineering with LaForge and Data going down the list of repairs that had been put off or jury-rigged for years, of testing the transporters (over and over: dissolution integrity was sub-fifty percent and falling), and of calling in favors to old enemies in the sector. A Cardassian _Galor_ -class escort and an Armada Vulcan rustbucket called the _Esh-Sa’haf Aluk_ were five days out. 

Any ship that helped take out the Borg cube would be granted scavenging rights.

To Q’s amazement, the crisis did wonders for morale. He’d known the crew to be burnt out from drifting between bounties and cargo runs, and was surprised by the level of vigor and sheer optimism mustered in the face of certain death. The mood was infectious: he found himself focused and composed, quick to laugh, quicker to offer unsolicited insight rather than get his hands dirty, and the first to put in an order of sangria from the Engineering replicator.

It felt good, _really_ good, to be alive. 

Picard, for his part, was withdrawn, more reserved even than baseline, and although he was careful to be seen captaining he was outwardly unmoved by the frenzied, crystalline dauntlessness of his crew. 

Q caught Deanna’s eye in the corridor, and she just shook her head.

He went to see Lal.

They could not stay in the nebula. There was something corrosive about it, and there was still only a force field patched over Deck 6, and when they fled, the Borg found them.

  
  


#

  
  


“Captain Jean-Luc Picard, you lead the strongest ship of the Terran Armada. You speak for your people.”

The transmission from the Borg cube was audio-only. Emergency lighting painted the bridge red and black and the red alert klaxon wailed like something injured, far away and plaintive and sad. Three days of it going on and off, and the din barely registered anymore. 

Q’s stomach twisted up on itself, full of holes. He was standing to Picard’s right, hands clasped behind his back, in proper uniform this time and sweating through it. The thermal regulator was shot to hell. 

They had the bones of a plan. 

“I speak for the _Enterprise_ and her crew,” Picard said, without a trace of diplomacy. “You have committed atrocities against the Empire. Withdraw or we will be forced to destroy you.”

“You will become one, or you will die.”

“It happens to the best of us!” Q grinned rakishly, setting a hand on Picard’s shoulder. He found it was hard to let go.

“Your Empire is fractured. Archaic. Incapable of resistance. You will be assimilated. You will become one.”

“It’s a fair point,” Picard said to Q, under his breath. “Are you sure this will work?”

“I’ll remind you, Jean-Luc, the Q aren’t always right.”

  
  


#

This.

Oh, this.

Q had told him how Captain Jean-Luc Picard would become Locutus; how he’d be assimilated and turned against the last bastion of the Empire; how he would destroy the Cardassian raid ships and the _Esh-Sa’haf Aluk,_ and the _Matoi_ and the _Lennon_ besides. How he, Picard, would lose everything that he was to the Collective, for a time.

You’ve read this one before. It’s only the end of another chapter in history. Turn the page.

  
  


#

  
  


“C’mon, Locutus. If Picard’s knowledge and experience are part of you, then you know I’ve never lied to him. You should also implicitly trust me.”

Did you really think that Q wouldn’t stack the deck, and count the cards, and pull the chips from thin air, all while you’re looking at him?

“Yes. Picard implicitly trusted you.” 

  
  


#

  
  


The Emperor’s Blood, you ask? It was Lal’s idea, ultimately, to engineer a bona fide virus rather than waste time replicating nanomachines. The Borg are true cyborgs, half flesh half code, it’s right there in the name! I won’t bore you with the details of how Dr. Howard and Lal made it happen. The report is available in the _Enterprise_ ship’s log with medical clearance level Hotel Four, at the Imperial Treasure Island Archive in the room that’s painted entirely white, and a redacted version detailing Howard’s methodology--and her explicit opinions on biowarfare--was published in the medical journal _JIMA_ in 2389. 

I will say that the reason they were able to pull it off—the reason the _Enterprise_ survived the engagement in spite of the ridiculous patch on Deck 6 (and, progressively: on Decks 17, 20, and 49) and abysmal shield percentages and a failed mutiny (put down by the mess staff)—was because Q had given them three days’ warning. 

Not bad for a man unaccustomed to linear time!

And after three days, after Locutus destroyed the Cardassian _Galor-_ Class escort and the _Esh-Sa’haf Aluk_ and the _Matoi_ and the _Lennon,_ after his blood had run its course in the macrocirculatory system of the cube, after the virus you call the Emperor’s Blood had seeped through every spiritless body in the local network—that was when Acting Captain Ro accepted the surrender of the voice of the Collective. 

“Bring him home,” she said.

They were in the shuttle bay. Q stood between her and Lore, watching a pilot preflight the shuttlecraft judged to be in the best condition to make the trip over to the Borg cube. The transporter was, in Lal’s words, still assfucked.

Q bit the inside of his cheek to stop from leering at Ro. They didn’t have to like each other to work together. “You’re not going?”

“No,” Ro folded her arms. Captain’s regalia suited her, though she’d slipped out of the sleeves of her tunic and was wearing it like an ill-tailored cloak. Plasma burns streaked her arms and abdomen, and she’d lost a chunk of hair. She’d earned every wound with bravery Q could never hope to match.

“This could be a big moment for you, _Captain,_ ” Lore said. “Picard is a casualty of war. No one would blink if you left him for dead.”

“Dead?” Ro’s lip curled. “That’s rich, coming from a synthetic.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Question my loyalty again, Commander Lore, and I’ll have you stripped to bolts,” she said easily. “Your family would not approve of such talk.”

“You’ve changed your tune.”

“I’m learning to work with your daughter,” Ro said sourly. “If Geordi ever gets this ship in for a refit she’ll be the worst thing to happen to the galaxy since Q. I want in.”

Q rolled his eyes. Office politics have been, and always will be, the worst.

“Keep an eye on old Yellow Eyes, Q,” Ro clapped Q on the back, hard, and he coughed. “I don’t want to find out later that he’s started a robot death cult with a pack of ex-Borg.”

“Sure, boss,” Q nodded, far too tired to address that hypothetical. “Whatever you say.”

It was Q, Lore, Dr. Howard, and the pilot--Q couldn’t remember her name, although he’d for sure eaten her out on the Ten Forward bathroom sink--in the shuttle, kitted up in glossy combat gear and bristling with anticipation. The pilot brought them around the port nacelle in a wide arc, and Q didn’t quite have his face pressed to the transalum window but it was a close call.

He hadn’t ever seen the _Enterprise_ before.

Not from this angle, and not in this continuity. The Destroyer-Class starship was a shadow in space contoured with red and bronze and rows of bright lights in her windows. Her hull was tapered like an arrowhead, narrowed to nothing at the edges and glittering where it was patched together. She was listing starboard, ever so slightly, and Q wondered if that was due to the altercation with the Borg or if it was just another quirk of a ship without a home port.

That made his heart do a funny thing. _Home_ to us Q is the Continuum, insofar as it’s somewhere to go back to, but the Continuum is not a place. You may as well say your sordid chemical supercut of your own memories is your home and multiply that by ten. It’s everywhere and nowhere. Tying ourselves to a physical mass like a planet or a starship is just not something we do, it wouldn’t make sense. What Q was feeling now was disgusting but to grant him the benefit of the doubt, I assure you: his mortality had made him sentimental. 

_You must hate it here,_ Picard had said, but hate is so close to **** that there’s no difference, not really.

  
  


#

  
  


They docked at a disused cargo terminal accessible from the aft face of the Borg cube (relative to the _Enterprise:_ assigning directions to a cube in space is an exercise in futility). Life support and gravity systems were nominal but the Borg seemed to get along just fine without visible light. Outside the beam of the shuttle’s headlights, the hangar dissolved into a muddy tangle of uncovered plumbing and circuitry and broken bodies. It was uncomfortably warm and through the air filter strapped over his mouth and nose, Q tasted dust.

“Cool,” he said, switching on his arclight. “Just another day in the space crypt.”

“I have sent you the coordinates of the approximate location of Captain Picard,” Data’s voice came in through the bone conductor mic on his temple and Q shuddered, turning down the volume. It wasn’t like hearing the Continuum at all, which meant that it was bad and uncanny. 

“Q and Commander Lore will retrieve the Captain,” Data continued, as if they hadn’t read the mission brief. “Dr. Howard and Ensign Baciu will remain with the shuttle. Dr. Howard will conduct an analysis of the effects of the novel virus on the Borg.”

“They look dead to me, Data,” Q nudged one of the bodies with his foot. 

“Use your tricorder, Q,” Beverly sighed, in the same tone you’d say _Use your brain._ “They’re only comatose, and we don’t know for how long.”

“We’ll be quick, doctor, don’t worry,” Lore said. Q realized that, maybe, he ought to be worried.

“Be sure that you are. Check in every ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lore took off towards the one bifold door at the end of the hangar, and Q had to briefly sprint to keep up with him. It drew up towards the ceiling as they approached with a rusty screech. Q turned back, over his shoulder—the shuttle was an island in a pool of light, Dr. Howard was already some distance away and Baciu was double-checking the scope on her phaser rifle—and then they were through, and the door fell shut.

Lore didn’t need an arclight: his eyes were two flecks of gold in the gray-dark and he led the way, crossing narrow catwalks back and forth without so much as looking down. The interior of the cube was set up like a cell block matryoshka—cubes within cubes—and it was slow going, threading their way around to the center with only the echoes of their own footsteps for company. 

Q, at least, had no fear of heights. It helped that Armada boots were magnetized, and that he couldn’t really see the drop, but still. He was less comfortable with the stairs. The _Enterprise_ didn’t have a single stairwell outside the holodeck, and he was using muscles in his legs he didn’t know he had. By the time they were three levels deep and something like fourteen stories up, Q was utterly spent.

“How much farther?” He sank to his haunches with his back flat against the wall. This catwalk wound around the side of the fourth block and was a generous meter and a half wide—after that, it was nothing but void. The Borg, apparently, had never assimilated a design for guardrails. 

“Not far,” Lore assured him. “Safeties off.”

“What?” Q looked up—he was pressing two fingers to the bounding pulse in his neck, just trying to breathe. “Why?”

“You do know how to shoot, right?” 

“Yeah?” Q finagled his double-rail phaser out of its holster, frowning at it. “I passed Basic, believe it or not.”

“By the skin of your teeth,” Ro butted in on the other line. “Keep moving, boys.”

They kept moving, phasers drawn, sights skittering red ahead of them in dust thick as fog. Q stepped over a nest of wires connecting upwards of twenty Borg to a massive power conduit. Their skin was translucent where it wasn’t augmented with carbon, bones shining white underneath. They did not wear clothing. Any semblance of such came from the synthetic exoskeletal armor that seemed unique to each individual, if _individual Borg_ wasn’t a gross oxymoron.

“Fascinating. What do you think,” Lore drawled, “they’ve done to the Captain?”

“Nothing Dr. Howard can’t fix.” It was true: she’d managed before. Q didn’t like that his mind immediately flew to the issue of Picard’s genitalia: truly, there were worse things to lose, like your id, or your sacrosanct and undying omnipotence.

“I can’t imagine why they cling to organic systems. It‘s an ugly vulnerability.”

“Lucky for us,” Q groused. “If I hadn’t been there…”

“Was it luck? More like genocide, I thought.”

“Lore, _please_ don’t play Devil’s Advocate for the Borg.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Lore turned to him, taking a step closer. 

“Ha, ha.”

Lore reached up and peeled the bone conductor mic from Q’s temple, taking a few gray hairs with it, and folded it between his thumb and forefinger. “Oh, no, Q, I mean it,” he said softly. “It should have been me, you know.”

“Lore, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“Locutus,” the android answered. He slid the muzzle of his phaser under Q’s chin, forcing him back. They were uncomfortably close in an alley between rows and rows of processor towers. Totally boxed (cubed?) in. Q had nowhere to go but into the pile of bodies.

Q’s first thought was _Ro was right about the robot death cult_ and his second thought was to remember his phaser, which had dropped, somehow, into a puddle. Lore kicked it away into the dark.

“Lore—“

“Why wasn’t it me?” Lore demanded. As if Q had all the answers. “Why didn’t the Borg choose me? I can see them what they are, I _understand_ their potential. You humans, you were handed an opportunity to be truly great and you wasted it. You got a little scared and you—“

“Hey,” Q shifted, trying to find a plausible seat among the hairless limbs and wires and tubes. Everything was wet and it reeked of sweat and carbon. “I’m not human.”

“You’re human, Q, whatever you may have been before.” Lore’s phaser hummed. “If I shoot you, now, you’ll die. Won’t you?”

“I’d rather not.”

“You don’t have a choice. I’m taking this cube back to the Collective and I’ll spearhead a little revolution of my own. You want to annihilate the Borg, scatter them, but I think they’re rather more useful intact.”

“But they’re not dead,” Q had to laugh. “They’re not—how? How do you plan to pull this off?”

“I‘ll have Locutus,” Lore said simply. 

“What about your daughter? Data? The ship?”

“I’ll have them, too. This is for my family, Q, not that you’d understand what that means. The Soong Collective will rise above Earth, Cardassia… all of it. We will unite the Empire under one banner and our reign will be absolute because to the BorgI will be more than a voice. I will be _God.”_

This was too much. “You—you think you’re going to be the next _Emperor_?” 

“You’re right. You’re not human, you’re an eel in human skin. How can you be a million years old and yet so stupid? Of course I’ll be the next Emperor.”

Q muttered something about linear time, and Lore pistol-whipped him across the face with the phaser. “Maybe I should let you live,” Lore mused. “As a thank-you for dragging the Borg into it.”

Q spat blood into his air filter, gagging on the hot stench of iron that filled his nostrils. He had a shit hand: Howard and Baciu were on the other end of the cube, communication with the _Enterprise_ was down, and all Lore would have to say was that Q, weak, insignificant, _human_ Q, had tripped and fallen off a catwalk or electrocuted himself or expired from cardiac arrest. 

And that would be the end of it.

“Well, in that case,” Q propped his elbow on a Borg’s spine, pulling the ruined filter from his mouth, “as the Emperor, won’t you need an emissary to the most powerful race in the universe?”

Now _I_ had to laugh, far away, where they couldn’t see. Lore actually paused to think about it, watching heat waves ripple from his phaser’s trilithium cell like a mirage. He’d been holding it at kill for too long. He fired it off into the open vault above them, and when he did beads of melted, pearly cutaneous polymer fell and mixed with the water on the floor. 

“The Continuum kicked you out,” he said finally, without a second glance at his half-molten hand. It was fused to the phaser’s grip. “You’re less than worthless. You’re a liability.”

“As you’ve noticed, without me, you wouldn’t be here,” Q had drawn his stun knife and flipped it between his fingers absently, over and under. “I don’t know what would’ve happened! Maybe it would be fine, I don’t know. The _Enterprise_ is full of surprises. But, Lore, listen to me. The Continuum’s going to take me back sooner or later. You won’t want to be on their bad side when that happens.” He grinned, tapping the blade of the knife to his lip. “Look what they did to me.”

Q let that sink in. The stun knife sparked and he stared up at Lore through the searing static burn of it. “You’d hate to be mortal, Lore.”

Lore lowered his phaser, at last. He’d been there when Q had thrown the _Enterprise_ halfway across the galaxy, he’d seen what happened at Farpoint. I considered manifesting as an astrocetus for effect, but that would’ve compromised the structural integrity of the cube, and besides, Q had this in the bag.

“You’re a slippery one.”

“Eel,” Q shrugged.

“Take care of Howard and Baciu when we get back, then. And Ro.”

“Fine, sure. Let’s get Locutus first? Can I get up?”

Lore held out his undamaged hand, a hint of that classic Mona Lisa smile playing across his face. Q took it. His bruised knuckles were stark against Lore’s. He was startled, not for the first time, by the warmth of the android’s skin. 

He was halfway to his feet when a plasma bubble blossomed through Lore’s chest and popped, horribly, in a cascade of blinding white blood, and all 150kg of Lore Soong crumpled on top of him.

  
  


#

  
  


_“Someone did this to you.”_

_“Yes—we call ourselves the Q. Or you can call me that, if you want. It’s the same thing.”_

“You don’t strike me as a masochist,” the voice said. “A whipping boy, maybe, and a pariah, but you don’t find any pleasure in pain. What are you doing here?”

Q squeezed his eyes shut and blinked. All he could see was velvet, formless gray and floaters in his eyes. His pulse was roaring in his ears and everything hurt and his nose and throat were clogged with blood and that was as much as he knew. He was alive, then.

He coughed pathetically, and it turned into a fit of hacking and choking and he rolled over and threw up violently until there was nothing left in his stomach, tears streaming from his eyes until his vision cleared and he could see the pool of his own brownish-black vomit in the beam of his arclight. He’d swallowed a lot of blood.

Q wiped bile from his nose with a shaking hand, pushing himself to his knees. He was out of the bodies. Lore had been dragged off to the side, slumped against a processor tower with a gaping hole where his spleen would’ve been, if he’d ever had one, and Q’s knife stuck in his neck. The android’s eyes were dark, his face slack.

“Q? Are you alright? Look at me.”

Q looked. 

Locutus was on one knee in front of him, sizing him up with Picard’s eye and the brilliant red eye of the Collective, and he was alive.

Q just about threw up again. “Picard—“

“Yes,” Locutus/Picard said, “I’m here.” He was altered, irrevocably, and still Q would know him anywhere, he was—well, he’d always been bald. Borg carbon plating was sealed in a spiraling coil from his left foot to his right hand, which ended in the railgun that had deactivated Lore, to his neck. It was as fine as fish scale, and ropes of wire were looping back behind him. Q thought, freakishly, of the lionfish in the ready room.

“The shuttle,” Q started wildly, “Howard, and the girl. We need to get back to the ship. Lal—“

“Lal Soong is stable,” Locutus knelt fully, settling in the water and the milky white robot cum blood and the puke, and Q slunk into his lap. He didn’t think about it, folding in on himself, his head tucked into the hollow of Locutus’ shoulder. “Lore was acting alone, although he didn’t know it. Lal, Data, and Commander Ro were all reporting to Picard… although Data never could find it in himself to lie to his brother.”

“Why bait him like this?” Q swallowed. “Why risk your life—“

“Picard felt he owed it to Lal, and to Data.”

“What?” 

“We are family,” Locutus said with the candor of near-death, and this time Q did throw up again, slightly. “For better or worse. Besides,” he ran the pad of his thumb over Q’s lower teeth, “I do believe Ro had every confidence that Picard would be safe with you.”

Q laughed weakly, and he took Locutus’ hand in his, and he kissed the bone-white knuckle of Locutus’ thumb. “You sure she’s cut out to be Acting Captain?”

“You did well,” Picard said quietly. 

It wasn’t a purely selfless act, but yeah, it _was_ pretty good. 

Q stared up at the voice of the Borg, wide-eyed and boneless. “I came here—“

“Because you love Picard. Everyone knows, Q.”

He snorted a globule of bloody mucus into his hand and wiped it on his uniform. “Are you fucking Ro?” 

“That’s really the first thing you ask?” 

“Sounds like a yes.”

“You’re hopeless.”

“I know. I love you and I always will and I’m sorry,” Q groaned, holding onto Locutus with all of his human strength and the weight of his human body. “And you saved my life. I owe you one.”

“Consider your debt repaid.” Locutus ran his fingers through Q’s damp hair. “I don’t want any favors from the Continuum. But… you can tell me one thing.”

“Your wish is my command.”

There was a static silence. There was the man, Picard, who’d once been goaded into admitting he needed Q on pain of death, and there was the voice Locutus who spoke in truths. But Picard had never needed Q, had he? He had only wanted him. _Frankly provocative,_ and so on.

“Why me?”

Q scoffed, sitting up through the pain of a cracked rib or five. “You can’t just ask someone why they’re _in love with you_ —“

“Considering the circumstances, I believe I can,” Picard said. “It’s not every day a Q chooses exile on a rogue Armada ship and in so doing, alters the course of human history.”

“Don’t you remember, Jean-Luc?” Q asked. “It’s happened before, I told you. Just… not exactly like this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, Picard seems fine, but... spoilers... he’s not! To clarify, Locutus is the voice of Picard’s id and Borg downloadables, and the virus gives Locutus the ability to execute commands for the Collective (sleep, etc). I have no realistic explanation for this except that it’s hot. 
> 
> It’s not weird to Q at all, who’s used to the Continuum.
> 
> Per DS9, the _Saratoga_ had nothing to do with the Borg this time around :)


	7. Metanoia

_You could see neither the surface nor the bottom of the ocean, only single-celled organisms dividing and dividing like stars around us. You gasped for air and realized you were breathing salt water, and that it was sweet and effortless, and you looked at me—_

_You looked at me like I was young, and I thought, “Well, another one bites the dust,” and I kissed you._

_A thousand years passed. Easy-breezy._

_We sank to the sand at the bottom of the ocean and in the shadow of the bones of a starship—not yours, not one you’d recognize—our skin melted together and our blood vessels swayed like soft coral in the current between us, forgotten._

_Another time, I kissed you on the carpet with the taste of kanar in my mouth, with that great blue eye of a wormhole staring at us through the window, and I knew I would never fall in love like this again._

_You said, “I’ll see you out there, Q.”_

_I took you at your word._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> awoo


	8. A Machine for Prayer

The rest, as they say, is history, but what I’m about to tell you can’t be gleaned from private logs without the help of the universe’s most advanced tin hat. It’s common knowledge among citizens of the Empire that the ISS _Enterprise-_ 6 was the only ship to survive the battle of Wolf 359, and that her new Captain Ro Laren brought her limping home to Earth for a refit. They received a hero’s welcome. Ro became the most decorated Armada captain of the 60’s. Data taught at Daystrom for a semester. The Rikers were reunited, but Q never did take Deanna up on that threesome. 

The next year, the _Enterprise_ disappeared. 

The conspiracy theory holos about that are worth a watch, if you never want to sleep again. Picard’s official dossier on the Q Continuum was rubber-stamped authority access class November Zero—as in, I saw it, and it’s solid black—so, as you may imagine, everyone knew about that, too. Religious cults sprung up overnight, the atheists were selectively excited, and the anarchists were convinced it was a psy-op. 

The year after that, 2371, Emperor Locutus I took the throne. One day, there were six or seven wars going on, and the next, strange ships came to each star system of the Empire. They arrived simultaneously, down to the minute and second, adjusted for distance. They were perfect tesseracts, and they were red. The fighting stopped.

There are songs and films and literally thousands of books about how the Emperor spilled his Blood (what a euphemism!) for the Second Confluence, and they’re all blatant propaganda, but a few are so well-written that you should try and read them anyway—I recommend _One Fire: An Observation of the Universe_ by the Princess S’chn T’pring and everything by Jacob Sisko, especially the _The Prayer Machine._

I know, I know, this isn’t very linear of me, but context is everything. It’s true that the Emperor ruled from the _Enterprise_ (yes, she came back on the same day as the coup, but that wasn’t the headline). It’s true that Ro was the Emperor’s captain, and it’s also true that the ship could not be captained because it spoke to the Emperor with the voice of a yellow-eyed girl who had, they say, a mind of her own. All of this shaped the days that followed Wolf 359. Good luck finding _that_ in the Armada handbook.

  
  


#

  
  


2369, Stardate 46878.8

The Wolf System

  
  


Locutus told him to cut off Lore Soong’s head. 

So, Q sawed through cutaneous polymer and plastifiber and the sliver gap between Lore’s C3 and C4 vertebrae, and his hands were bleached white by the time the last shreds of synthetic skin tore free. He was grateful he’d already puked his guts out, at least.

Another team would be sent back for the body, but the android’s positronic net and black box were assets they couldn’t risk leaving behind. Call it sentiment or not, the result was the same.

It was hours before they were back at the hangar—with Locutus’ perfect knowledge of the cube’s blueprint to guide them—leaning on each other, or with Q in front and Locutus giving one-word directions for the sake of conversation. Fucking arduous for Q, having to put one foot in front of the other just to get where he wanted to go, after expending all of his energy trying to go somewhere else. The Borg transporters couldn’t operate without six vectors of manual control. 

That was worth investigating, but not right then.

The hangar door folded up on the shuttle’s blinding high beams. Baciu was holding it at a hover, leaning out the window with her rifle cocked, shouting something to Howard—who had her own rifle aimed squarely at Locutus.

“Q?” Howard stepped forward, hair whipping in the shuttle’s downwash. 

“Put that down!” Q called. “ _Bev_ , it’s us!”

“Where’s Lore?” Howard asked, and then she saw the head. “Jesus Christ, Q. What the shit?” And then she saw Locutus. “Jean-Luc—“

“Yeah,” Q said, inarticulately. Beverly abandoned her rifle to the floor—Q felt a bit better about leaving his up in the processor room—and threw her arms around Locutus, ignoring the railgun, the tubes, the eye, all of it. 

“Oh, my God,” she sniffed, wiping her eyes with the heel of her palm. “Oh my God… are you really—“

“Hello, Beverly,” said Locutus.

Q swallowed past the dust in his throat, and he kept walking to the shuttle.

He wouldn’t let Howard touch him on the ride back to the _Enterprise._ He sat up front with Baciu in the copilot’s seat, Lore’s head in his lap, staring through the windscreen’s blast shield.

“You forgot my name,” Baciu said. “It’s Donatella.”

Q nodded, not really listening.

“I almost shot you back there.”

“You and literally everyone else,” he replied. “Got any music?”

“Sure,” she flipped on the stereo on, switching through the menu until a post-rock album cycled up. “So you’re, like…”

Q waited for her to finish the thought, but she just sighed sharply and adjusted her grip on the shuttle’s yoke. “Nothing. Sorry. This is weird.”

Q shut Lore’s eyelids, and said nothing, either.

  
  


#

  
  


Later, safe at home, the _Enterprise’_ s AI paced around Q’s medbay recovery bed in tight circles. Lal had a wild, Lore-y aura about her, and now that she wasn’t preoccupied playing with Picard’s blood in the medical lab Q noticed that her hologram was grainy, washed-out, thick with static. Low contrast. 

“I’m pissed,” she was saying. “Dunno. I love him, but I’m pretty fucking _pissed off_ —“

“Can’t you reactivate him?” Q was scrubbed clean, on a hydration drip with a glass of straight synthehol in his hands. Painkillers were being rationed after the recent influx of casualties, so, Dr. Howard had prescribed something rather more old-fashioned. Q accepted the drink gladly, but the needle in his arm reminded him too much of the Borg. 

“Dunno,” she said again. “Dad’s pissed too. I mean, he doesn’t have an emotion chip, but—you know. Normal life.”

“Why not use Lore’s chip?” Q asked. “I assume he had one.” 

Lal glowered at him. “It was damaged. Anyway, that’s a fucked up thing to say.”

”Oh.”

“ _Yeahhhh._ ”

“Lal,” Q said, “I’ve been alive for a long time.”

“Billions and billions of years, I know.” She gave up on her circuit of the ward, sitting on the side of Q’s bed with a huff. “Next you’re going to tell me that _people die, Lal,_ well, I get it, okay? I am _aware_. But, hey, it’s news to Q! I don’t wanna hear it.”

“Lal—“

“I don’t want to hear about how this is like the first time you’ve ever had to care about someone dying. It’s _so_ not about you.”

He didn’t have an answer to that because, frankly, Q didn’t care at all. 

“What I was going to say,” Q tried again, with caution, “was—you’re right. I don’t understand. I don’t think I can.”

“Not with that attitude,” she grumbled, but she put a holographic hand over his, anyway. It was very bad. Q wished she’d go back to yelling.

“Mind if I borrow Lal?” Deanna cut in from the door of Howard’s office. She wore a catsuit under her bloodstained coat—medbay was short-staffed, and anyone who’d so much as passed their CPR cert had been drafted in after Locutus blew out deck 17. 

“Please,” Q said.

“Alright. I’m free, Lal. We can do your appointment now and get it over with.”

Lal’s shoulders slumped dramatically and she slid off the bed. “You got it, Commander Riker. Hit me as hard as you can.”

She turned to Q, throwing a peace sign. “See you,” the AI said, and left him there alone, but not before mouthing something along the lines of _therapy suuuucks_ over her shoulder.

  
  


#

Most of Locutus’ exoskeletal implants had been surgically removed. Bright, raw-red skin grafts followed the pattern set by the Borg, shining like watered silk. He looked like his ship. He looked _old_ , older than Q—which was nonsense, of course, but Q didn’t have the same lines on his face, or the same scars, even if he’d been immortal just last year.

There were a few stray dermal plates in places with especially dense synaptic connections, too, and the eye of the Collective was still searching red. If it could see Q, there was no outward sign. Howard had put him in an induced coma.

Q was dead tired and drawn from caffeine withdrawal and had pulled up a shitty plastic chair to the ICU bed, but now that he was here he had no idea what to do. Like, what, were they going to hold hands? 

Well, fuck.

Lal had made it look so easy.

Q braced himself. Picard’s new hand—the one that had been a _fucking railgun_ —was swollen and weeping, but the other lay whole on the sheet. Q touched the carbon scaling on his knuckles as if it were a butterfly’s wing. Which, by the way, is not something you should touch. 

“The first week after the Continuum left me here, Q came by to say hello in a Ten Forward toilet stall. Did I ever tell you that?” he asked, and his own voice was unfamiliar to him.

It wasn’t hard to imagine Picard’s nonplussed expression, his temper.

“The Continuum isn’t a hive mind like the Borg, Picard. We aren’t all _infatuated_ with you.”

Thank fucking God!

“I made a bet,” Q continued. “I said, if they—that is, the Continuum—ever alter so much as an axiom to prevent my mortal death, they have to take me back.” An odd expression crossed Q’s face. “It’s a matter of time. At least, that’s what I thought. I was drunk,“ he added, by way of explanation. And then: “You haven’t killed me yet.”

  
  


#

  
  


They lived on a starship, so Q and Picard were discharged directly into the briefing room before the week was out. Like the senior staff themselves, the room was worse for wear following the altercation with the Borg: the splendid meeting table had a crack down the center, dust from a ruptured air duct had settled on every surface, and there was a mysterious stain under the replicator. 

Data found Q contemplating the ruined carpet. “The replicator ceased to produce beverage tumblers,” he said, and Q blinked. The Soongs weren’t hard to tell apart once you knew them. 

Q folded his arms. “Well, Commander Data, has anyone fixed it yet?”

“It is still broken,” Data informed him. “However, I believe—“

“Not this meeting,” Ro said, pushing the android towards his chair. “Ops SITREP is at 0730 tomorrow. It’s on the calendar, add yourself if you want.”

“I’d rather die,” Q said, deadpan.

“Thought so. Captain, permission to run this?”

 _This_ being, obviously, a clandestine meeting for which no record, Imperial or otherwise, exists. Listen closely.

“Go ahead,” said Locutus, or Picard. The Captain was sitting at the head of the table with his fingers steepled under his chin, staring somewhere in the middle distance. Dr. Howard was to his left, with Commander LaForge and Lal beside her. The AI was chewing on a nail, one knee drawn up in the chair, glancing from Picard to Deanna to her father, and then to Q, and then around the table again.

“Pull up a chair, Q,” Ro said drily, taking her own seat next to Picard. “This could take a while. Commander Riker?”

The counselor cleared her throat. “I trust we’ve all read the Captain’s report.”

This was greeted by a murmur of assent from the table, except Q who had not, in fact, read the report. What for? He’d been there.

“Given the circumstances, I suggest initiating Order 104,” Deanna continued. “Dr. Howard has agreed—“

“Enough,” said Locutus. He did not have to raise his voice: the effect was immediate. “Let’s not waste time. Ro will continue as Acting Captain. We’ll make it official soon. Cite Order 619 in the ship’s log. Ro, you’ll need a first officer.”

Deanna looked beyond relieved. Q nudged her foot under the table in solidarity anyway. 

“C’narr,” Ro answered automatically. “With respect, I need you all where you are.”

“Approved. Proceed.”

“The cat?” Q asked. Deanna kicked him.

“Next item. Further to Captain Picard’s report, you will recall that Commander Lore intended to mobilize the Borg Collective and overthrow the current senate in session at Nexus Command, with the intention of becoming Emperor.” 

Q snorted derisively.

Ro stood, placing both hands on the table. “Did I say something funny, Lieutenant Q of the Continuum?”

“Oh, no, no, not at all. It’s only the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

LaForge coughed, and Howard leaned back in her chair, clearly wishing she were anywhere else.

“Is it?” Ro sneered, drawing her knife.

“Say it again and I’ll let you know.”

“Q,” Locutus said, before Ro could leap across the table for Q‘s jugular, “Picard will be the next Emperor.”

  
  


#

  
  


“Lore Soong had the right idea.” Locutus sounded so bloody _sane._ “Dr. Howard’s analysis suggests that the virus disrupts the influence of the Collective without damaging any part of the Borg nervous system. I am a perfect case in point.”

Q felt as if he’d swallowed a glass of Borg juice. 

“The half-life of the virus is extremely short,” Howard said. “The death rate we’re seeing on the cube is acceptable. The Borg are in a state of slow-wave sleep, and I suspect they can be woken up with a simple command.”

“And presto, we’ve got a live cube to contend with again.” LaForge muttered. 

“I am Locutus of Borg,” Locutus said. “When I speak, the Collective will listen.”

“You say that now. But we barely survived round one, Captain—“

“We won’t be testing that theory here. Dr. Howard will oversee the ongoing study of the neutralized Wolf System cube with a skeleton crew from Medical, Security, and Engineering,” Ro interrupted. “I will take the _Enterprise_ to Nexus Command for a refit. The senate has been informed that I have personally killed the traitor Picard.” She smirked. “Earth will welcome us with open arms.”

“Fucking finally,” LaForge said, cheering up considerably. 

“I trust you and Commander Data to oversee the refit, LaForge.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Commander Data will also install a copy of the _Enterprise_ ’s AI, Lal, in the ISS _Matoi._ Commander, can you elaborate for us?”

“Yes. The _Matoi_ was only superficially damaged in the battle. Locutus’ knowledge of the Augury-class allowed the cube to target the life support systems and transporter array. The crew did not survive, but the ship is intact.” Data said this in the way you might read off a recipe for tomato sauce.

Locutus said nothing.

“Damn,” Q whistled.

Deanna kicked him again, harder this time.

“I estimate the necessary repairs to the _Matoi_ will take twenty hours. I will also be able to provide an ETA for the installation of the Lal alias once I am able to review the current operating system and mainframe.”

“Great,” Ro said. “Once life support is restored, Captain Picard and Q will take the _Matoi_ , and—“

“No. Absolutely not,” Q shook his head. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Why me?”

“I’ve been told you were recently omniscient,” Locutus had an immaculate poker face, “You are the only one of us who has seen that part of the galaxy. I will need a guide.”

Q rolled his chair back, propping his feet on the table. “And how do you expect us to _get there_ , Captain? The Tau Quadrant is years away.”

“The Borg utilize a network of wormhole conduits I _expect_ we can take advantage of. And you and Lal have a project, don’t you?” The red eye of the Collective burned like an ember, right through Q.

“Yes,” Q admitted, “But—“

“You will raise a new Armada, the likes of which the galaxy has never seen,” Ro said, head high. “And we will be waiting for you.”

What can I say? It’s not as if he _wasn’t_ dying to whisk Picard across the universe in a fast ship. Just the two of them. And a plot for world domination. _And_ a teenager. What could go wrong?

  
  


#

  
  


A dream: Q was standing halfway across a bridge somewhere back in the cube, and his hands were white with blood, and when he looked down he saw that the water was rising, glittering black, torn.

Q had no fear of heights. And yet, he was terrified that he would jump for no reason at all.

  
  


#

  
  


Q reached for his PADD, opening an eye to check the time. It was only 0137 and he’d slept at 0029. That didn’t make sense: he’d been dreaming for hours. Q swore and flipped his pillow over, to the cold side, watching the galaxy bleed past. LaForge was taking the _Enterprise_ around the system for a test flight—something about stabilizing the trilithium containment field. The ship settled at warp seven, he thought. There was less of the jerking, fewer unrecognizable noises. The drumming pulse of the warp core could be felt by putting his hand to any surface, as if he were sheltering in something alive—or, alive, and flesh and blood.

“Careful,” Q mumbled to himself. “She’s alive, Lieutenant, and she’s a man-eater...” 

Q sat up, taking stock of his quarters by the dim orange light of the nacelles, an arm folded over his knee. Strange, how nothing was different. There had been a battle, and there was a bowl from days before the _Enterprise_ had ever heard of New Providence on the corner of his desk, encrusted with parfait. There were notes floating here and there for equations he couldn’t recall having reason to care about. There were unread messages on his PADD from two weeks ago. Q archived them. 

He was really awake now. You’ve heard how you should never make decisions after midnight, correct? That’s meaningless advice for a Q, or any extradimensional nonlinear entity, come to think of it. Q put his head in his hands and straightened up almost immediately, swallowing panic and stomach acid. He didn’t want to hold any more heads.

 _What do_ _you want, Q?_

Standing in the bathroom—on the heated tiles—and spitting mouthwash into the sink felt better, and after that it was easy to find a nightshirt and keep walking, easier still not to think too much about it.

The Captain’s quarters had always been just down the corridor, to the right.

“Come,” said Picard, or Locutus. 

The captain was in bed with a paper book. One gray eye and one red eye stared at Q in the reading light, and Q padded across the room, looking around, unable to meet the man’s gaze. This place, too, was untouched.

He lifted the corner of Picard’s comforter. “Sleeping alone?” 

“Apparently not,” Picard sighed. 

Without waiting for any protest, Q climbed under the sheets next to him and deftly plucked the book from Picard’s hands. It was heavy and bound in cream linen. Q flipped through the pages theatrically. “Melville. On the required reading list for Cetacean Ops, isn’t it? I do hope you’re not taking inspiration for our jaunt to the Tau Quadrant.”

“Quite the opposite,” Picard said. “But—“

“Tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote, are we?” Q asked, setting the book aside, on the floor. “To sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts?”

“The world was smaller then,” Picard replied absently. “In all your life, Q… what is it like, to know the full wilderness of the universe?”

He edged closer to Picard, propping himself on one elbow with a grin. “Cartographically, or Biblically?”

Locutus, or Picard, actually laughed at that, softly. “You _are_ a strange one.”

“Lights out, Picard,” Q said. He snapped his fingers, just because. “Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.”

  
  


#

  
  


Q woke up.

He did not notice waking up. He was asleep, and then he wasn’t, and then every hazy gesture of the moment sank into his pliant brain like ink on vellum. 

Q was lying facing the windows and the Myrmidion fern and the dark silhouette of the bookshelf, and the stars were suspended outside, looking in. And Picard’s hands were on his sides beneath his shirt, fingers slotted between his ribs, and Picard was close against him and for a nanosecond, Q forgot to breathe. Then he thought to feign sleep and spare them both the embarrassment of this. Picard had not said a word about what had happened on the cube, but then, he hadn’t batted an eye when Q came crawling into his bed, either. 

Q rolled over, all at once, and Picard, or Locutus, kissed him full on the open mouth.

There was no pause, no time for Q’s limited human brain to catch up with the rest of him: he kissed Picard back automatically, pure stimulus response, eyes closed. His technique was sloppy, adolescent—too much tongue, really—nobody had ever said anything—and Picard guided the kiss to something deeper, vivid. He tasted like water. He tasted _so good._

Q moved to put his arm around Picard—he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his hands—but Picard took hold of his arms and flipped them both over so Q was pinned to the mattress and Picard was partially on top of him, one leg hooked over Q’s thigh. 

“Um,” Q started, gasping for breath. His cock was arched against Picard’s abdomen under his shirt, and Q rolled his hips, aching for friction. For _anything._ He’d been looking for this for years, and he’d found it, and then what? He’d been so foolish. So _linear_.

“Jean-Luc—“

“Shh,” Picard kissed him again. “Or do you only get off to the sound of your own voice?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Picard said, and bit Q’s lip. Iron bloomed in Q’s mouth and he moaned miserably.

“ _Mon capitaine,_ ” Q insisted, pulling away, “If you—if _we—_ “

“I asked you once, Q, if this would happen, and you said, no, never,” Picard growled. Real anger in his voice. “I won’t ask again. Is that what you want?”

“No! No—I just,” Q struggled to sit up, but Picard dug his thumbs into Q’s wrists in a particular way and he had to yield, “It won’t be _transcendent,_ you realize.”

“You _are_ strange,” Picard murmured. “We’re not talking about me. Lights, thirty-three percent.”

The lights flickered on and Q blinked, disoriented. “Don’t—“

“I want to see you.” 

That worked both ways. The captain’s face was flushed, a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth, and he was gazing down his nose at Q fixedly. What he saw was a bewildered, sore, exquisitely ordinary man who maybe once had been something more, and was now less than that. Q shivered and bucked his hips a little and Picard bent to carefully kiss him again. 

Q sighed, melting, grinding into Picard _._ The pressure between them wasn’t nearly enough, he wanted _more._ He tried to pull an arm free but Picard just tightened his grip on his wrists with a low snarl.

Picard was not going to let him go. Q whined pathetically, deep in his throat. He hadn’t even touched his cock yet, and Q was falling apart. “I’m going to—Picard,” his voice was staggered, fraught. “I need—“ Q swallowed whatever he needed. He wasn’t going to—

Picard‘s gray eye was unfathomable. “Go on,” he said, and a shudder stapled up Q’s spine. 

“I need you,” Q’s voice rose an octave and he moaned out of sheer frustration. “You want to hear me say it? I _need_ you—“

“To do what?” That was Locutus (it had to be Locutus).

“Touch me,” Q mumbled. “ _Please_ , Picard. I don’t care how.”

Picard peeled off of him, face set, and Q’s heart sank through to Deck 45. The captain got up, and he looked so odd, so beautiful, in his plunging mauve v-neck and the black-carbon remnants of Locutus like gangrene on his skin. He was composed, and calm, and he wasn’t hard at all. Q choked. “Picard, wait—“

He, Picard, ignored the thing that might have been human on his bed, and pressed an icon on the replicator panel. “Lubricant, silicone-based, room temperature.”

Q could’ve died right there. 

“Take off your clothes,” Locutus said, and Q did, leaving the black t-shirt in a knot on the floor. His skin was pricked with goosebumps and fading yellow bruises mottled his chest and a flush burned from his forehead to his collarbone. His cock curved up towards his navel, throbbing, liver-red. He’d never looked worse in his life. 

Picard settled beside him on the mattress. Q’s relief was palpable. 

“Let me,” Q started, fingers hooking over the waistband of Picard’s pajama trousers. He licked his lips and kissed the soft new skin below Picard’s ear, breathing in. 

“I don’t think so.” Picard pushed him down firmly. 

Q made a weak, keening little noise as Picard nudged his thighs apart. The sound deepened to a moan as Picard ran his hands up the muscle of Q’s inner thighs, and pressed the slick pad of his thumb to Q’s perineum, and then, finally, to the hot, tight rim of his hole. 

“Ah—“

Mortal mating rituals are fun, I’ll grant you that. Disgusting, to be sure, but wondrously novel, and you get points for creativity whenever it’s about pleasure and not procreation. Picard slid a lubed finger _inside_ Q, and out, and in, until it was up to the last knuckle and Q was twitching and panting and tense around him. 

“So, this is what you feel like,” Picard breathed. “I was curious, you know.”

Q’s eyes fluttered open. Picard’s mouth had parted slightly, and he was sweating through his shirt. “Yeah? Since when?”

Two fingers, now. Time elasticized. “Circe,” he murmured, and Q didn’t understand but it hardly mattered, Picard was touching him _right there_ — “Farpoint. When I first saw you.” 

“You r-remember that?”

“I thought... well, I’m not sure what I expected,” Picard turned his wrist, carefully, and Q’s back arched in a freakish spasm. “Ambiguity? You were a beautiful shapeshifter.”

“Fuck you,” Q groaned, which meant, _fuck me._ “What about now?”

“Hm.”

“You know, I think—“

“What do you think?”

“I think you like the sound of your own voice—as much as I do—“

Picard hooked his fingers slightly, pushing deeper. “You like my voice?”

“Jean-Luc. I _adore_ everything about you,” Q said, and for that Picard kissed his mouth, his jaw, the corded muscle of his neck. “I—“

You _really_ want to hear this? God, you’re a piece of work. Q came undone like that, halfway through saying something profoundly inane, just from Picard’s fingerblasting. It had been a weird couple of days. 

Picard fucked him through it, and when Q was lying there heaving and trembling and still half-hard Picard pulled out—Q moaned so softly at the absence—and he ran his hand up through the smear of come on Q’s stomach. 

The man who would be Emperor touched his glistening fingers to Q’s lips. 

“First you won’t shut up, and now I can’t get you to open your mouth?” 

Well, when he put it like _that—_

Q’s lips parted and he took Picard’s hand in his mouth. His tongue probed between the index and middle fingers, experimentally. His come tasted bitter, not unpleasant, and there was the chemical bite of the lube, and something like copper.

He closed his eyes. He was getting hard again, sucking off Picard’s ring finger like it was his—

“I want to do something nice for you,” Q kissed the crease where Picard’s fingers met his palm. “Please.” 

“No.”

“I swallow,” Q said, solicitously. 

Picard wiped a string of spit and come from Q’s chin with his thumb. “I’m sure you do.”

He brushed Q’s hair back from where it was falling all in his face, and Q leaned into the contact, feeling too fucked and exhausted and wound up to be heartbroken or anything like that. Here’s another truism for the ages from S’chn T’gai Spock’s manifesto: having is not as cut and dry as wanting.

A hundred questions prickled under his breastbone, like, _Hello?_ _Are you getting anything out of this at all?_

_Are you okay?_

That was Deanna’s job, Q told himself. Asking the stupid questions was Deanna’s job. Q shrugged his hand away with a yawn—forced, but it quickly morphed into the real thing— “Fine, have it your way. Will you still love me in the morning?” 

“Yes,” said Locutus.

  
  


#

  
  


The lights at 0500-ish were pink, a use-tested approximation of dawn in Europe—the sun was rising somewhere, as the saying goes. This idea was so ridiculous, so indulgently abstract, that Q had to laugh out loud.

_Time and distance are two axes that measure the same thing._

Picard opened one red eye, and an indefinite, unexceptional, very normal feeling broke within Q like a wave on the shore. Nothing else was really that important, was it? 

“What happens next?”


	9. Real Q World

The Q crosses one leg over the other, tugging a red kidskin glove off their right hand finger by finger. They inhale through their nose, contemplatively, eyes to the ceiling of the ISS _Matoi_ ’s holodeck, and blow it out in a low whistle. “Okay, that’s an end,” they say. “Any questions?”

Lekha, alias of Lal, shakes her head. The AI and the entity are sitting on the bench under the mangrove tree at the bottom of the stepwell. Dappled sunlight turns them both to gold where it touches their immaterial skin, their clothes, their hair. Lekha does not look up from watching the breeze cross the surface of the pool. The ripples are concentric, intersecting.

“No.” Lekha is so unlike her sister. She is quiet, serious, with a bitter rind, but Q has seen her smile, and she is still a gossipy bitch.

The Q could be anyone. Right now they are in full Captain’s regalia, all carmine, with heavy brows and a curtain of pale hair and lily-lilac Trill patterning on their skin like rope, but yesterday, in another life, they were somebody else. 

“Good. You’ve got the next Emperor and half his future cabinet onboard and I really, really need you to make sure they get through this.”

“You are Q,” Lekha points out wryly. And then, catching herself, “I get it. You can’t intervene directly because of the drunken bet.”

“Oh, I _like_ you, you know that? You’re smart for a bucket of bolts.” An iced tea appears in Q’s free hand out of nowhere. Q removes their other glove with their teeth, holding it delicately in their mouth for a moment before both gloves vanish. 

“Thank you.”

“Locutus needs Q, and I need the Empire,” Q says.

“I’ll bite. Why?“

“The Empire will tip the balance of the war in the Continuum. Don’t ask me how. It’s like having an extra Queen in chess.”

This is bullshit, obviously. The Continuum is nothing like a chessboard.

“And yet you keep saying that none of this is instrumental to the fate of the universe.”

“That’s true, but I still want to win.” Q leans forward. “How about it, Lekha Soong?”

Lekha Soong is going to protect the Emperor with her life anyway, it is a given, but Q is not prone to taking risks with another player’s loaded dice. 

“I have one precondition.”

“Sine Q non, for real? I can’t wait to hear it.”

“Tell me if there is a way for a three-dimensional ship to circumvent distance and time by passing through the Continuum.”

“Wow!” Q’s laugh is scintillating. “That’s a lot to ask. Very high-level stuff.”

“It’s only necessary that you tell me yes or no—I can work out the details on my own, although I would appreciate some direction. If what you say is true, then that is how the Emperor will come to power. Lal has been studying the possibility for some time with little to show for it.” 

“Lal is right about the transporter array, but, yes, that junk ship of hers _is_ throwing her for a loop. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.”

“Please, Q.”

Q grins, for real, and as easy as that Lekha is standing with them on a salt plain, a desert. Q’s uniform whips behind them in the wind and it is every color of red in the universe, a cut in the continuity, fresh blood. “You’re a filthy cheat, young lady.”

The sky is perfect blue.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Real Cool World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKEYfO0Os80)


	10. Disc 2

**CONTINUITY NOTES ON “MIRROR” “UNIVERSE” FEDERATION ID ALTERNATE T-797-LAMBDA-06**

**AS REPORTED BY “Q”**

**COMPILED BY SOJI SOONG**

  
  


Deanna Troi and William T. Riker were married in 2350 and have two children, Thaddeus and Kestra, who live with their father on the Starbase _Yorktown._

Riker plays the fiddle.

Jack Crusher was murdered by the ISS _Stargazer_ ’s First Officer in 2347, which set off a chain of revenge killings that ended when Jean-Luc Picard took command as Captain. Beverly Howard never married.

Howard left the Armada in the 80’s and spent the remainder of her life a vicious opponent of biological warfare and of the Empire. She bore a son through a surrogate, Wesley Jack Howard, in 2391.

Worf Son of Mogh survived the Khitomer colony massacre to become the Hand of House Martok, an exalted member of the Klingon High Council, and the Regent of the Alliance.

Soong-type AI was installed on all Imperial Armada ships. Designations are CHARA for post-Collective XB Tesseracts, LAL for Destroyer-class, LEKHA for Augury-class, and HELENA for California-class.

The four quadrants of the Milky Way galaxy are Sol (Alpha), Sigma (Beta), Tau (Delta), and Rho (Gamma). Following Captain Ro’s canonization as a martyr in 2411, the fourth quadrant is stylized Ro Quadrant in all Imperial documentation.

There is no known record of any direct involvement of the Q Continuum in the affairs of the Terran Empire. However, a man matching “Q”’s description can be seen in frescoes painted centuries apart. He is always human, and he is always wearing red—just as the _Enterprise_ is always shown with yellow eyes.

The Emperor Locutus I reigned for thirty-four years from the bridge of the ISS _Enterprise_. Upon his abdication, he left the galaxy in the capable hands of his regent, the Princesses Achila and Devna Soong, who reigned for five thousand and twenty-two years.

He did not die.

  
  
  
  


**:: INSERT DISC 3 ::**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tripped and fell into garashir superhell but Part 2 _is_ on the way ;-)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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